Electrical Characterization and Testing of BGA Gripper-Type Socket for High-Speed Applications

Ball Grid Array packaging technology has become a viable option in today's high-speed integrated circuit design, where utilizing a BGA socket is essential in high-performance applications. This paper discusses the electrical characteristics and testing of a single-sided gripper-type pin socket technology. Due to the irregular shape and discontinuities of the gripper socket pin, it has become very compelling to study the signal integrity effect for this socket pin technology and its suitability in multi-Giga Hertz applications. The gripper-type socket was modeled and characterized at higher frequencies for multi-ports single-ended and differential configurations. To achieve this, 3D numerical simulations were performed using the HFSS FEM model from Ansoft Corporation. The S-parameters of the socket pin with 0.5-mm pitch testing configuration were evaluated up to 40 GHz. In addition, the insertion and return loss of single-ended and differential configurations were characterized at frequencies of 5 and 10 GHz. Furthermore, Real- time functional testing was conducted to perform read-and-write operations using an embedded Multimedia Card (eMMC) memory grippe socket platform.