Beyond 10 Gbps? Challenges of Characterizing Future I/O Interfaces with Automated Test Equipment

State-of-the-art automated test equipment is now able to address I/O data rates in the 10 Gigabits-per-second (Gbps) data range. This is an achievement that remained the domain of racks of bench instrumentation and appeared very challenging for ATE systems until just a few years ago. With the I/O data rates of CMOS integrated circuits continuing to grow, the challenges for designing automated test equipment continue to increase. This paper provides a discussion of the signal integrity challenges that automated test equipment must surpass to successfully characterize future I/O interfaces that could even reach 40 Gbps.