Optimisation of Fine Pitch Contactor and Test Board for QFN Package

Abstract

Fine pitch contactor describes a contactor with smaller air gap between the contact pins. It is used for testing small portable devices. This work presents the optimised way of designing the 0.4 mm pitch contactor and test board for QFN package. The signal integrity of fine pitch test contactor has become a concern due to the small air-gap between the pins that leads to signal crosstalk and impedance mismatch issues. The same challenge had been seen when designing the fine pitch test board because of the requirement to meet 0.4 mm pitch for typical hand-held devices. It restricts the trace routing with typical design rules at the contactor mounting area due to the limited spaces. This would bring to impedance discontinuity and crosstalk effect. Therefore, optimised design rules on the fine pitch contactor and test board are necessary. Full-wave modelling and system level simulation were demonstrated to study the fine pitch design rules. While the full-wave modelling was to construct the contactor and test board components, the system level simulation was intended to study the signal transmission when propagating from one component to another. Overall, designing the fine pitch contactor requires extra study on the signal integrity and layout design. This paper presents a method to study and design the fine pitch contactor design. It reports the test board to achieve minimum losses and distortion test system for functional testing. Our simulation results for finepitch contactor model show that the return loss is less than 12 dB at 4 GHz.