Arlon Inc. has announced the availability of CLTE-AT, the latest addition to its CLTE product line. It represents Arlon's commercial offering using common technologies developed for their high-performance CLTE-XT, but modified to make the product more affordable for commercial applications. Applications include temperature and loss-sensitive filter applications, collision avoidance radar, multilayer RF PCBs, temperature-stable antennas and other microwave and RF applications.

To establish a lower base cost, CLTE-AT has fewer options for copper style and panel sizes. CLTE-AT is a micro-dispersed ceramic PTFE composite utilizing a very fine woven fiberglass reinforcement to provide the highest degree of dimensional stability and registration consistency — especially when utilizing thin laminates such as 0.005 inches and 0.010 inches. CLTE-AT is said to have Best-in-Class insertion loss (S21) and loss tangent (0.0013) in the commercial marketplace. To further improve performance in high-frequency applications, CLTE-AT uses smoother copper styles with average surface roughness of less than or equal to 4.0 µm — this compares to many competitive offerings using rougher 9-10 µm copper. This reduces insertion loss and transmission line resistance, but still maintains the peel strength required for thin traces on thin laminates. For newer commercial, millimeter-wave applications, this represents a significant performance enhancement over existing technologies since skin-effect losses become significant at higher frequencies.

CLTE-AT exhibits low thermal expansion and extremely low dielectric constant change with temperature. Together these characteristics bring about very stable phase length and impedance values across wide temperature excursions. The higher thermal conductivity of the material also improves heat transfer relative to alternative materials and enables better power handling.

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