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Permittivity Dielectric
Materials
Updated July 3, 2010 Emerson &
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Permittivity is a property which is associated with how much electrical www.signametrics.com/
charge a material can store in a given volume. The units of permittivity
are Farads/meter. The Farad is named after Michael Faraday. Permittivity
is what controls the value of a capacitor, beyond its physical dimensions. Moisture
Measurement
Microwave
Permittivity of free space Moisture
Instruments for
The permittivity in vacuum (free space) is denoted as 0. Its value is laboratory or
process use.
8.85418782E-12 Farads per meter (see our page on physical constants). www.tews-elektronik.c$
No material has a permittivity lower than that of a vacuum.

Relative permittivity (the dielectric constant)

Materials other than vacuum have permittivity higher than 0, often they
are referred to by their relative permittivity, denoted R:

material= 0x R
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In microwaves, we often refer to relative permittivity as the "dielectric
constant". These terms are interchangeable, but "relative permittivity"
sounds more scholarly if you want to pretend to be a nerd. Saying
"relative dielectric constant" is like saying "deja vu again".

Note: an alert professor points out the the relative permittivity is not
always a constant for a given material, it can change with frequency,
temperature, date of manufacture or supplier, or even direction of
propagation. Pay attention to this valuable comment, because some day
you will design a microstrip filter and find out the hard way that we
usually don't know EXACTLY what the dielectric "constant" (which really
isn't a constant) is. If you know the value within +/-1%, you are in
better shape than the rest of us!

Most microwave materials have dielectric constant between 2.2 (PTFE)

and 9.9 (alumina), because so many materials are engineered by mixing
these two materials. If particle size is kept small compared to a
wavelength, and the ratio of materials is well maintained from batch to
batch, the mixture will be well behaved. See our pages on soft and hard
substrate materials for data on a wide variety of materials. Here's a page
on miscellaneous materials.

Permittivity can also be a function of direction, which leads us to the

definitions of two classes of materials:

Isotropic material
A material in which the permittivity is NOT a function of direction. Most
materials are isotropic, thankfully! More information on isotropy and
anisotropy is provided on this page.

Anisotropic material
A material in which the permittivity IS a function of direction. An
example is sapphire. The interesting thing about sapphire is it has the
same atomic composition as pure alumina (Al2O 3) but alumina is
amorphous while sapphire is crystalline. Thanks to Luciano for pointing
this out!

Effective permittivity
Note: Keffective is further discussed on this page.

In non-TEM transmission lines such as those realized in microstrip

media, most of the electric fields are constrained within the substrate,
but a fraction of the total energy exists within the air above the board.
The effective permittivity (a.k.a. effective dielectric constant) takes this
into account. The effective dielectric constant of a fifty-ohm transmission
line on ten mil alumina is a number somewhere around 7, which is less
than the dielectric constant of the substrate bulk material (9.8), but more
than that of air (which is 1).
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Another example of an effective dielectric constant is if you were to
create a stripline circuit using two sheets of substrates with different
dielectric constants. To a first order, the effective dielectric constant
would be the average of the two materials' dielectric constants. A third
example is coplanar waveguide transmission lines with air above the
substrate. Here the effective dielectric constant is very nearly the average
of the substrate dielectric constant and one (the relative dielectric
constant of air). Thus the effective dielectric constant of CPW circuits on
GaAs (ER=12.9) is approximately 6.5.

Measuring dielectric constant

This topic has been moved to a new page.

Complex permittivity and loss tangent

Permittivity is actually a complex number, so "epsilon" is made up of two
parts:

(Thanks to Maarten for correcting another recurrence of us mixing up

"permeability" with "permittivity" on this dyslexic web site...) Epsilon
single-prime is the number we usually deal with, and causes no loss, and
in most day-to-day engineering you don't see the prime notation. The
imaginary epsilon double-prime is the culprit. Microwave engineers
usually deal with the ratio between the two, which is called tangent delta,
or tanD (say "tan-dee"), for short. If tanD is zero, there is no loss due to
dielectric. For example, dry air has no dielectric loss.

Note that relative permittivity is the ratio of epsilon prime to epsilon

zero:

The loss tangent creates a loss that is proportional to frequency. See our
page on transmission line loss calculations for more information.

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