Design Challenges and Optimization Strategies for High-Speed Connector Test Fixtures

With the evolution of communication protocols such as PCIe and Ethernet toward higher speeds, test fixtures— the intermediate interconnect tools for verifying connector performance—face stringent challenges in core metrics: insertion loss (IL), crosstalk, and skew. This paper analyzes the technical bottlenecks of current test fixtures in high-frequency scenarios, relates them to recent protocol roadmaps (e.g., PCIe Gen6/Gen7 and 112G/224G Ethernet), and proposes practical future design optimizations.