Wafer probing is a testing process to inspect semiconductor wafers before packaging for defects by checking the electrical conductivity via physical contact between the wafers and the probe card. During the contact process, the shape of the probe needle and the mounting configuration onto the probe card have large influences on the stresses and contact force that the probe needles experience. In this paper, static performance of a vertical-type probe needle integrated with floating mount technology is analyzed with a nonlinear finite element analysis. The comparison between fixed mount and floating mount technologies is a part of the analyses. The geometry of a vertical probe needle is optimized to minimize the stress that occurs during the overdrive process, while maintaining adequate force for proper contact with the wafer. Effects of major overall dimensions of probe needle on the maximum stress and contact force is analyzed first, and then curvature of the probe needle body is optimized by employing a constrained minimization function, fmincon, in MATLAB. The maximum stress in the vertical probe pin at 125 ??m overdrive is effectively reduced from 1339 MPa to 972 MPa by applying floating mount technology over the fixed mount, and further reduced to 666 MPa by applying the optimization scheme. The final optimized design induced the contact force of 5.217 gf, which is in the range of the required contact force of 5 to 8 gf. Fatigue life increased from 19,219 cycles to 108,129 by applying floating mount over fixed mount, and further increased to 830,596 for the optimized design.

There has been an increase in demand for the wafer-level test techniques that evaluates the functionality and performance of the wafer chips before packaging them, since the trend of integrated circuits are getting more sophisticated and smaller in size. Throughout the wafer-level test, the semiconductor manufacturers are able to avoid the unnecessary packing cost and to provide early feedback on the overall status of the chip fabrication process. A probe card is a module of wafer-level tester, and can detect the defects of the chip by evaluating the electric characteristics of the integrated circuits(IC's). A probe card analyzer is popularly utilized to detect such a potential probe card failure which leads to increase in the unnecessary manufacture expense in the packing process. In this paper, a new probe card analysis strategy has been proposed. The main idea in conducting probe card analysis is to operate the vision-based inspection on-the- y while the camera is continuously moving. In doing so, the position measurement from the encoder is rstly synchronized with the image data that is captured by a controlled trigger signal under the real-time setting. Because capturing images from a moving camera creates blurring in the image, a simple deblurring technique has been employed to restore the original still images from blurred ones. The main ideas are demonstrated using an experimental test bed and a commercial probe card. The experimental test bed has been designed that comprises a micro machine vision system and a real-time controller, the con guration of the low cost experimental test bed is proposed. Compared to the existing stop-and-go approach, the proposed technique can substantially enhance the inspection speed without additional cost for major hardware change.