Characterization of printed circuit board structures such as embedded transmission lines and vias has relied on coaxial connectors or surface probing with high frequency microwave probes to provide interfaces to test equipment. Both approaches require vias to access internal layers which can severely distort high frequency behavior of the structure being measured. This paper describes a different access technique that allows a clean launch directly from microwave probes into a stripline structure. The quality of the launch is sufficient to permit characterization of small structures to frequencies of 40GHz. This technique now allows each segment of an electrical net to be decomposed into individual canonical elements with uniform interfaces. These elements can then be used to synthesize S-parameters for a general class of nets based on experimental data.
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