Improvements to Millimeter-Wave Dielectric Measurement Using Material Characterization Kit (MCK)

This article presents an in-depth study of material measurement, at G-band (140-220 GHz), using a commercially available material characterization kit (MCK). The permittivity of homogeneous dielectric materials, obtained from MCK measurements, rises slightly with frequency, and this does not agree with the expected physical behavior. Based on electromagnetic simulations and measurements, it has been identified that this small error is due to the dispersion associated with the corrugated horn antennas of the MCK. To address this problem, a simple phase compensation scheme has been proposed and applied to the measurement results of five common kinds of dielectric materials. The processed results eliminate the rising slope error observed in the raw data and are in good agreement with permittivity values reported in the literature, which validates the proposed approach.