Silver screen printed transmission lines- analyzing the influence of substrate roughness on the RF performance up to 30 GHz

In this paper, the authors investigate the influence of DC conductivity on the RF performance of screen printed traces on a flexible substrate. From literature, much work has been done on the effect of sintering conditions on the electrical resistivity of printed traces. Typically the traces were printed onto substrates with negligible surface roughness. Yet this would not be the case for printing on textiles for wearable electronics applications. In this paper, we investigate the electrical resistivity of screen printed traces on a substrate which is similar to fabrics, in that it is flexible and has non-negligible surface roughness (Ra∼1μm). In particular, an accurate simulation model was developed to correlate with the measurement results, which would provide guidelines for the modelling of similar printed traces to predict their RF performances.