Designing a good stackup starts with understanding the materials. And luckily the materials of a PCB are pretty simple. Glass fiber, epoxy, and copper foil, right?
Well, if you follow the discussions about losses due to skin effect, dielectric loss, etc. triggered by the constantly higher signaling speeds required, you will know that the devil is in the details. Like copper roughness. With effective skin effect depths approaching sub-micrometer this is a really important thing.
So now you have to call out exactly what copper foil you want on your boards. And today that is not the end of that story. See how Rich Pangier from Isola explained the acronym confusion for copper foils as they are used in laminate production and PCB outer layers.
(Open directly on YouTube)
You may also want to see Rich explain how prepregs and laminates are manufactured (and yes there is a lot of details about the weaves that you want to understand also).
We cover this and more about designing good PCB stackups that can be manufactured across multiple fabs and still meet your requirements in the 3-day Signal Integrity with Hands-on Simulation course as well. Copper foil specification is only part of it.
M.Sc.EE, SI Consultant