A Simple Solder-Free Fixture for Surface Mounted Device Measurement

In this paper, we design a simple solder-free fixture that is used for the de-embedding measurement of the surface mounted device (SMD). The device under test (DUT) is pressed on the pad of the printed circuit board (PCB) trace and a good electric contact is achieved. Unlike the traditional fixture (where the DUT is welded on the pad), no additional disassembly or welding is required for the proposed fixture. To verify the feasibility of the solder-free fixture, several Murata high-frequency surface mount capacitors and inductors were selected for testing. The inductance and capacitance values were measured by the proposed fixture together with the vector network analyzer. It is found that the measurement error does not exceed 3.5%, which is within the tolerance of 5% from the vender. The advantage of the proposed solder-free fixture is its simple design. In comparing with the traditional fixture, it can greatly increase the efficiency for mass repeatable measurement.