The processing of liquid crystalline polymer printed circuits

After many years of development, liquid crystalline polymer materials are finally ready for significant use as a printed circuit board material. These materials have a ways had very attractive electrical and physical properties but were a challenge to be made into industry acceptable circuit boards. Through extensive technology development efforts by Foster-Miller to develop biaxially oriented LCP film, producing high quality substrates is now possible and are available from Rogers. As with all new substrate materials, a set of appropriate circuit fabrication processes must be selected to support this new material set. This paper addresses some of these processes.