The paper presents a rigorous, one-port measurement technique for the characterization of on-chip pad response, particularly the pad capacitance (Cpad). By adding two independent (“short” and “match”, or two terminations with known impedance other than “open”) standards to the existing one-port method, the method eliminates the errors in the current vector network analyzer (VNA) method, while providing frequency-dependent data. This not only overcomes the fundamental restriction in conventional two-port measurement methods that are prohibitively complex, but also is better than existing one-port methods that are inaccurate due to lack of two independent measurements. Simulations and experiments are performed to validate the proposed method in the paper.