July 18, 2007 – FormFactor Inc. has developed a probing contact technology capable of full-area wafer probing of high pin density, ultra-fine pitch devices, announced the company at SEMICON West.

Compared to today’s probing capabilities, FormFactor’s new technology will reportedly provide a 10x reduction in pitch (spacing between contacts), and potentially allow the probing of 1000x more contacts on a 300mm wafer in a single touchdown.

The new technology can be leveraged across memory, logic, SOC and parametric test applications, with either area array or peripheral test contacts.

“This fine-pitch full-wafer contactor technology is well suited to address the future testing needs of all semiconductor devices, without the trade off between testing pad pitch, density and throughput,” says Ben Eldridge, FormFactor’s CTO.

Following Moore’s Law, device die size has been continuously shrinking while the number of testing pads for new device function and performance has increased. In order to cope with this trend, semiconductor device designers will need to reduce the physical dimensions of the testing pads while maintaining high throughput. FormFactor’s new technology can reduce the contactor pitch for an area array from approximately 200 microns to less than 20 microns. The new MEMS contactor technology is anticipated to be commercially available within three to five years.