Probe card for maintaining the position of a probe in high temperature application

Abstract

Probe card is a part which is incorporated into a probing equipment to test finished IC chips, This card is customarily mounted with a plurality of probes, very fine needle and generally bent, and each probe is disposed so that its front end may pinpoint to a pad of an IC chip of interest. In performing the probing test, a most important condition is to keep the probe contact pressure on the pad of an IC chip at a constant position during measurement time, but in performing such at a high temperature, heated IC chips radiate the probe card and thereby positional deviation of the contact point is caused by heat expansion of the probe card and hence the contact pressure may change. The invented probe card employs a ceramic material in fabricating the probe card for possessing a very low expansion coefficient or for possessing an equivalent coefficient value to the IC chip or wafers, thereby the positional deviation of the probe contact is avoided and other devices to cope with difficulties caused by performance at a high temperature are disclosed.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.