Signal Integrity comparison of commercially available sockets for the 50Gbps Ethernet channel

As the demand for data center networking bandwidth proliferates, improving the test sockets available in the market is imperative. This paper looks at two commercially available sockets, the elastomer and pogo pin sockets, to investigate the feasibility of Ethernet speeds of 50 Gbps and beyond. 3D FEM (Finite Element Modeling) Ansys HFSS software, along with COM (Channel Operating Margin), is used to evaluate the performance delta between socket-less, elastomer, and pogo-pin sockets. The results show that the elastomer socket performs similarly to the socket-less case and is transparent during channel analysis despite additional components in the channel path. The pogo pin socket has only a slight performance degradation due to the resonance interaction between the pin and channel.