Design and measurement for millimeter-Wave PCB and broadband RF interconnection

In this paper, one RF calibration PCB board is used to evaluate two different calibration and de-embedding methods: traditional TRL (Thru-Reflect-Line) and 2x-Thru de-embedding. The insertion loss test result from those methods are same at millimeter-wave frequency band. While TRL shows non-causality issue and higher error at phase delay. Finally, 2x-Thru is selected to evaluate several typical scenarios of high-speed interconnects: Transmission line and PCB parameter extraction (Dk, Df and Surface Roughness); RF transition between chip's BGA package to PCB; 0402 RF broadband terminator. The results from 2x-Thru meet our requirement of de-embedding quality.