Measurements of the silicon die characteristics of packaged drivers for high-speed I/O

As the data rates of high-speed I/O interfaces with large numbers of I/Os increase beyond 5Gb/s it becomes increasingly difficult to separate out the effects of silicon performance from the interaction of package, socket and test fixture characteristics. This work discusses the need for separating silicon measurements from the channel measurements of a packaged device, the challenges of making these measurements on high-pin-count devices and proposes some methods to achieve this with some experimental results.