This talk provides an overview of some prominent laminate material characterization techniques that are crucial for evaluating laminate permittivity and losses. These techniques are compared and contrasted with newer in-situ methodologies that excel at extracting parameters that yield highly accurate measurement-simulation correlation, highlighting where they excel and where they fall short.

The talk also demonstrates some common phenomena that can lead to dispersion in the measured time delay and effective dielectric constant, namely anomalous dispersion from discontinuities and non-TEM dispersion in microstrip structures.