Development of a 1.35 mm Coaxial Blind Mating Interconnect for ATE mmWave Applications

With the continuous increase in the usage of mmWave frequencies for consumer applications, the test and measurement industry needs to keep up and provide interconnect technologies for test and measurement at these frequencies. Automated test equipment vendors face the additional challenge of having to use blind mating interconnects on the test fixture, because a threaded interconnect is not acceptable in a high-volume production testing environment. In this paper we present the development and first results of a blind mating interconnect for automated test equipment based on the upcoming 1.35 mm coaxial connector standard. We describe the mechanical design and integration on the automated test system and also the initial performance results. We will show that this new blind mating interconnect can support frequencies up to 90 GHz.