Dispersion, attenuation, and crosstalk are several major challenges that both a high-speed digital and a microwave serial link must overcome to achieve their desirable performance. These phenomena are directly related to the frequency dependency of the dielectric property of the material used in package and interconnect. The dielectric property of a material is commonly measured by its manufacturer in a particular direction at a few discrete frequencies using resonator and waveguide methodology. Since the dielectric property may vary during manufacturing processing, the measurements taken by the manufacturer might be not adequate. Moreover, the dielectric property of a material in a bandwidth that covers at least the second harmonics of the fundamental operational frequency is required to accurately predict the link performance. One of the efforts in this research is to investigate the methodology of realizing broadband characteristics of the dielectric property of a material in its "as packaged" configuration using various transmission line topologies, such as microstrip line and Co-Planar Waveguide (CPW). Transitions from CPW to other transmission line topologies are mandatory if CPW probes are used to achieve broadband and repeatable measurements. Since microstrip line is one of the transmission line topologies involved in this research, a research effort is dedicated to develop a broadband CPW-to-microstrip line transition. An effort is also expended to creating casual material models that can be used in electromagnetic simulators to appropriately model the link based on the polarization mechanism of the materials. In addition to focusing on the measurement method in frequency domain, Short Pulse Propagation (SPP), a time domain method, is investigated as well. A virtual test bench is created to investigate the correlation between impedance variations in stripline structures due to fabricated tolerance and the attenuation predicted by SPP.
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