Formulas of dielectric and total attenuations of a microstrip line

This paper constructs a simple formula of distribute conductance of a microstrip line and then of the dielectric attenuation with only one arbitrary constant, p = 1.08. By adding the formulas of the dielectric and copper, a similarly simple formula of total attenuation is obtained. Both formulas of the dielectric, as well as the total losses, agree closely with the numerical results by HFSS software over wide ranges of frequency and microstrip parameters. The simplicity of the formulas gives an interesting insight; that is, a microstrip line is considered a high loss at high frequencies f because of the overtaking of the slower skin-effect loss of $\sqrt{f}$dependence along the copper strip by the faster current-leakage loss of f dependence across the dielectric substrate from strip to ground. The formula is verified with simulation by field software but not by hardware measurements. Hardware experiments are actually unreliable in the case of microstrip line attenuation; the details, evidences, and quantification of the reliability are discussed in Appendix A.