Cameron Harker and Yohannes Desta, Ph.D., recently presented at the SWTest 2021 conference. Their presentation – Challenges of Expanding Large Area Arrays for Fine Pitch Vertical Probe Cards – received the conference’s Best Data Presentation award.

Image credit: FRT Metrology

Semiconductor manufacturers are on a relentless mission to reduce the total cost of sorting testing. An important factor contributing to reducing the cost of testing is the increased simulations of the device under test, which necessitates a further increase in the active area of ​​the probe card.

FormFactor worked on the development of a new probe card architecture to address the complexities of fine pitch, high CCC, and high temperature range for wire-link probing applications.

The automotive semiconductor market is one of the industries that is leading the adoption of this new probe card architecture. The automotive IC market is forecasted to reach approximately $40 billion by 2021, growing at a forecast CAGR of 16.8% from 2021 to 2025.

Considering the increased demand and shortage of chips due to the impact of the pandemic, the timing for this new probe card architecture is excellent.

Challenges for automotive semiconductor testing that the new probe board architecture addresses include:

• Automotive OEMs Cut Costs to Stay Competitive
• Dense device circuits under the pads
• Devices can be sensitive to variations in CRES and CRES
• Pad pitch continues to decrease
• Buffer sizes are reduced to accommodate array size shrinkages
• Structures are typically peripheral pads for wire bonding applications
• Extreme temperatures in testing continue to rise

To ensure that these challenges are met and to improve the active area of ​​the probe card, FormFactor has designed a new probe card architecture – Large Area Arrays (LAA). For more information on this new architecture and how it meets the growing demands of the automotive IC market, download the presentation here (PDF).

This information has been extracted, revised and adapted from documents provided by FRT Metrology.

For more information on this source, please see FRT Metrology.