fine ceramic instead of Printed Circuit Board in Bluetooth d

waldman · Joined: 25 Jul 2007 Posts: 6

I have heard that a new technology uses fine ceramics in the PCB of the
chipset of Bluetooth dongles. This is supposed to be more resistant to
interferance and heat. It also makes the chipset smaller and so the dongle.
Does anybody know about this?

Archived from group: alt>cellular>bluetooth

John_H · Joined: 25 Jul 2007 Posts: 2

Ceramic substrates for electronics are nothing new. They were in WW-II
munitions and I got to play with them in college about 2 decades ago.
Multilayer ceramic substrates were an interesting technology when I was
closer to what was happening in the industry but weren't quite practical
at the time. The heat dissipation of a ceramic is an advantage. Weight
is minor for the strength attained. Ceramics do shatter, but with less
mass for the substrate and the (un)packaged electronics inside, they can
hold up much better, as they were when fired from the anti-aircraft guns.

Interference should be unchanged from normal PCB designs. I would
expect the only size advantage is from using unpackaged electronics
closer together because of the heat conduction the substrate allows
since modern PCBs should have much better signal density for the same
substrate size.

Ceramics don't solve everything, but the technology has its place.

waldman wrote:
> I have heard that a new technology uses fine ceramics in the PCB of the
> chipset of Bluetooth dongles. This is supposed to be more resistant to
> interferance and heat. It also makes the chipset smaller and so the dongle.
> Does anybody know about this?
>
>