Equipment for measurement of complex permittivity

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Derivation of complex permittivity is important to many electrical and biomedical engineering applications. In electronic engineering, new fabrication processes and system integration techniques are introduced that often utilize thin substrates or semiconductor carriers. To characterize the interconnects and substrates used in these emerging compact systems, propagation constant and effective complex permittivity should be extracted. The experimental methods that are employed for this purpose must provide accurate characterization of the low frequency region that is often missed in wide band measurements using vector network analyzers. Therefore, especial impedance measurement instruments are needed to cover the low frequency region. The RF impedance and material analyzer requested in this application has such capability and yields the complex permittivity and permeability profiles. In fact, derivation of complex permittivity has found application in biomedical engineering and emerges as the innovative method of non-invasive cell growth monitoring. One of the most challenging fields of regenerative medicine is the treatment of insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus. Implementation of tissue engineering principles allows for islet regeneration in situ and islet neogenesis in vitro. A method based on complex permittivity measurement can be employed for monitoring cell behavior in situ which is of critical importance in implementing in vitro culturing of the islets.Additionally, the information about complex substrate characteristics is crucial in predicting and evaluating the performance of microwave circuits, and in particular, those that are designed based on slow-wave propagation, electromagnetic bandgap and metamaterial concepts. Short pulse transmission measurements provide wideband characterization of these circuits. The low frequency complex permittivity is used in interpolation of the data obtained from short pulse technique to extract loss tangent in a wide frequency range starting from DC to tens of GHz. The set of equipment requested in this grant application will be used for inspection of cross-disciplinary material characterization problems.