Comprehensive Socket Characterization and Correlation for High-speed Interface Testing System

The mobile, compute, and automotive industries have steep demand for high bandwidth, high speed semiconductor devices. To help meet this demand, sockets work as an important part of enabling reliable tests for massive volumes of products. Large scale, automated testing continues to be an important factor for operation margins. Socket assemblies help reduce volume testing time when compared to soldered down chips. However, as target data rates and clock frequencies increase, signal and power integrity issues become more challenging in socketed test solutions. Designing test platforms with sockets in mind and validating the signal integrity of those socketed test platforms is key to success. Therefore, it is crucial to be able to accurately model and predict the effects of the socket parasitics in the interconnect to gain good understanding of the system level channel performance margins. By utilizing a special test vehicle to measure the electrical characteristics of socket pins, a representative socket model can be correlated to the measured data, thus having an accurate and scalable socket model. Having confidence in a socket model will allow for accurate system level simulation to be able to predict signal integrity channel margins.