Touchdown Technologies intros single-touchdown, full-wafer probe card for advanced DRAM testing

SEMICON West 2010, CUPERTINO, USA: Touchdown Technologies, a wholly owned subsidiary of leading semiconductor test company Verigy, has introduced its 1Td300 full-wafer probe card, the company’s first probe card for single-touchdown, high-volume testing of advanced DRAM memory devices.

Touchdown Technologies will demonstrate the new product, capable of highly parallel testing of 300 mm or 200 mm wafers, in Verigy’s booth (#5847 in North Hall) at the SEMICON West trade show, July 13-15 in San Francisco, Calif.

Capable of testing an entire 300 mm wafer with only 2 g of force per probe – the lowest probe force in the industry and less than half that of comparable products on today’s market – the 1Td300 probe card offers the dual advantages of reducing forces on the wafer under test and the entire test cell as well as allowing higher pin counts to extend semiconductor testing roadmaps.

According to the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS), parallelism will increase from 512 sites tested in 2010 to 768 for commodity DRAM wafer testing in 2011. This equates to a pin count of more than 50,000 for today’s DRAMs, climbing toward 100,000 as die sizes continue to shrink.

“As pin counts escalate for advanced semiconductors such as DDR3 memories, reducing the cost of test requires ever-increasing levels of parallelism,” said Patrick Flynn, president of Touchdown Technologies – a Verigy Company. “With our new 1Td300 probe card, we’ve developed a reliable, single-touchdown testing solution with ultra-low force that achieves the required planarity and scrub performance without risking damage to the devices under test.”

Touchdown Technologies’ new probe card utilizes proprietary, full-wafer architecture and MEMS-based ACCU-TORQ torsion probes to perform highly planar, single-touchdown testing.

This product launch follows last year’s introduction of Touchdown Technologies’ first 1Td300 single-touchdown probe card for NAND and NOR Flash memories.