Numerical Verification of Dielectric Contactor as Auxiliary Loads for Measuring the Multi-Port Network Parameter of Vertical Interconnection Array

For the accurate and reliable multi-port characterization of vertical interconnection array structures, this paper presents an indirect-contact probing method to obtain network parameters of N-port device-under-tests (DUTs) using an M-port (N > M) vector network analyzer (VNA) with a dielectric contactor. By utilizing the dielectric contactor as auxiliary loads for un-probed ports for vertical interconnections, multiple M-port sub-array network parameters can be correctly synthesized into the N-port network parameters through the renormalization processes. To verify the proposed method, four-port DUTs for packaging and microwave applications were characterized with two-port indirect-contact probing sub-array simulations including the dielectric contactor. Compared with two-port direct-contact probing simulations without the dielectric contactor, it was confirmed that the proposed method with the dielectric contactor provides improved accuracy in terms of the feature selective validation (FSV) method.