MM-wave Partial Information De-embedding: Errors and Sensitivities

De-embedding methods making significant structural assumptions have become popular in recent years, particularly in PC board and cable assembly spaces, because of the relative immunity to repeatability and standards availability problems at the DUT plane. Some of the same issues occur in mm-wave fixtures where repeatability can be even more of a challenge.

The intrinsic errors, repeatability behavior and configuration sensitivities of one such method, based on phase localization of structures in the fixture using reflection data alone, are studied in this work with examples in the WR-10 and WR-2.2 bands. For some classes of fixtures, the repeatability immunity and standards sensitivity can be orders of magnitude better than with classical methods while showing similar sensitivities to first tier calibration issues. The absolute errors can, however, be substantial for certain distributions of mismatch within the fixture.