Design and Testing of a WR28 Waveguide Blind Mating Interconnect for mmWave ATE OTA Applications

This paper presents the design and testing of a WR28 based blind mating waveguide interconnect for over the air testing of antenna in package modules with automated test equipment. The waveguide blind mating interconnect is required for the connection between the measurement antenna that is embedded on the production test cell handler plunger and the measurement instrumentation of the automated test equipment. This interconnect needs to be disconnected each time a new device under test is inserted on the socket by the handler. This requires that the interconnect reliability is in the range of 1 million cycles or even higher for a commercial volume production test cell.