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PCB material setup helper
Name your board material. Get a substrate, conductor and layer stack set up with loss included.
PCB material setup helper is a free AI skill for the job "Build and ship software". Give the instructions to an AI assistant that supports the required files and tools, then review its output.
Free · No account · BSD 2 Clause licence · Made by MathWorks · Level: advanced
Made by MathWorks. See the original on GitHub; we copied it as it is, with its licence.
What it does
Pick your board material and walk away with a substrate, a metal and a layer stack that behave like the real thing, loss included. Every RF board design starts here, and wrong material numbers ruin every result after it. The skill looks up common materials such as FR4 or Teflon from a built-in catalogue, or builds your own from dielectric constant, loss tangent and thickness. It sets conductors like copper or gold with real conductivity. For several layers it builds a stack with a thickness for each. For wide frequency ranges it adds a frequency-dependent loss model so results stay accurate. It runs in MATLAB with the RF PCB Toolbox.
You give it
- Your material name or its datasheet values
- Layer thicknesses
- The metal you use, such as copper or gold (optional)
- Your frequency range (optional)
You get
- A substrate object with the right loss
- A conductor object with real conductivity
- A multi-layer stack with thickness per layer
- Material code you can pass to later designs
Use it when
- You are starting an RF board design and need a substrate defined first.
- Your datasheet gives dielectric constant and loss tangent, and you need a material from them.
- You want a multi-layer stack for a stripline or embedded design.
- Results need to stay accurate across a wide frequency band.
How to use it
- Add it to your AI once: download it and add the folder to Claude, ChatGPT or Codex as a skill.
- Ask for the job in your own words. Your AI opens the skill when it fits.
- It works best when your AI can run MATLAB with PCB Toolbox.