Low cost measurement of material properties is a valuable tool which can aid in pre-layout design and post-layout verification. This paper analyzes a low-cost technique to measure the dielectric constant of a microstrip substrate using a Time Domain Reflectometer (TDR), explores the artifacts which can arise in these measurements and provides guidelines to reduce these artifacts.

The paper was presented at the 2022 IEEE EMC +SIPI symposium and can be found here. The slides for the presentation can be found here.