Calibration Kit for 4-Port Horizontal/Vertical Probing

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a horizontal/vertical calibration kit for calibrating a vector network analyzer(VNA) to measure the vertical connector pin. If the conventional calibration kit is used, we should change the arm for a probe or need an assistant device and it takes a long time. In addition there is a risk of precision degradation caused by the position change of the probe tip sensitive to the surroundings. We suggest a 4-port vertical calibration kit to make up for the aforementioned shortcomings. The calibration kit was manufactured for the SOLT calibration method. 'Short', 'Open', and 'Load' are available in the horizontal plane, 'Thru' is available not only in the horizontal plane on the two planes of a PCB, but in the vertical plane between the two planes according to the positions of the probes. We complemented the conventional calibration kit to make a vertical calibration kit to be used for the vertical measurement method. We compared and analysed their reflection/transfer characteristics of the SOLT calibration standards of the proposed calibration kit and conventional one, we get a ±0.1 dB differences of transfer characteristics in the range from 300 kHz to 8.5 GHz. In order to demonstrate usefulness, and we performed a case study for horizontal and vertical cases, and compared the results of the proposed calibration kit and conventional one.