The cost of a probe card rarely stops at purchase: assembly consistency, post-clean residue, storage environment, test criteria — wherever a line lacks the equipment for one of these, the problem surfaces later, in volume production. This MEMS probe-card manufacturing and validation cleanroom lays out the whole chain by its real process bays and marks which parts our equipment covers and which are left to specialist suppliers. Click any tool to zoom in on what it does and the product behind it; the two ends of the room are incoming and shipping.
4 Production · 4 Engineering · 1 DevelopmentDrag to orbit · scroll to zoom · click a tool to zoom in
Drag to orbit, scroll to zoom. Click any tool to fly in and read what it does.
Expose and develop the mould
A thick resist layer on the wafer is exposed and developed into an array of mould cavities matching the probe cross-section, so probe shape and array position are already fixed at this step; Probing does not supply equipment for this step.
Grow the probe body in the mould
The wafer goes into an electroforming bath where metal grows layer by layer inside each cavity, and the alloy system and bath conditions set the probe's springiness and wear life; Probing does not supply equipment for this step.
Lap to thickness, then release
The electroformed face is lapped to its design thickness, the sacrificial layer is etched away and the probes come off the wafer as loose needles, which are trayed and handed to incoming inspection on the assembly line; Probing does not supply equipment for this step.
Cast the sheet, punch the vias
Ceramic slurry is tape-cast into green sheet, dried, cut to layer size and punched with the interlayer via pattern - the first step of the multilayer-ceramic space transformer; Probing does not supply equipment for this step.
Fill the vias, print each layer
Conductor paste fills the vias and each layer's circuit pattern is screen-printed, and how well the layers register here decides whether they still line up after firing; Probing does not supply equipment for this step.
Register the layers, press them into one body
The printed sheets are stacked in order under registration and pressed into a single body under heat and pressure.
Fire, lap flat, then metallise
The body is co-fired with its buried conductors so ceramic and metal densify together, then lapped flat and finished with surface metallisation and plating into a space transformer that can be bonded and pressed against; Probing does not supply equipment for this step.
Measure and bin probes
Released probes are measured for length, tip form and straightness, then binned and loaded into carrier trays for the assembly line to draw from.
Machine guide-hole array
Upper and lower guide plates are laser-drilled or EDM-machined with the guide-hole array that constrains each vertical probe and sets its buckling geometry; Probing does not supply equipment for this step.
Electrical check before assembly
Purchased probe card PCBs and space transformers are spot-checked for continuity and resistance on a double-sided flying-probe tester before entering assembly; this equipment is outside Probing's scope of supply.
Cut to length and drop to tray
Probe stock is fed in as wire or as an array, a laser cuts each probe to the target length, and the cut probe drops into the tray for pickup.
Pick and align the probe
The pick gripper takes each probe from the tray and seats it against the fixed jaw of the alignment stage, which clamps it and corrects attitude and position, with jaw clearance matched to probe thickness.
Bond consistency held by recipe, not by feel
The weld gripper takes the aligned probe from the stage, places it on its substrate pad and runs the laser micro-weld, with joint energy and dwell time held in the recipe.
Bond defects found here, not in volume
An autofocus vision unit confirms the weld position and contact face of each finished joint, and the result is written to the work order with material, operator and recipe version, and serves as the contact-position reference for wafer electrical test.
Which pins are out of tolerance, answered by coordinate
The populated card is scanned probe by probe for tip X, Y and Z position, probe length and array planarity, and positions outside the project threshold are flagged by coordinate.
Electrical test and touchdown in one tool, every failing channel tied to a coordinate
PCT5801 and DeepTouch1000 form one combined cell.
Condition tips and clear residue
The card is run over a grinding plate along a set path to condition tip shape and height and to clear residue from the tips.
Clean or not is settled by the customer's own acceptance criteria
The card is cleaned by recipe with atomized IPA, controlled soft brushing and clean-gas blow-off with vacuum recovery of residue and particles, then re-imaged from three directions to judge residue, particles, bent probes and abnormal tip shape, with thresholds defined by the customer acceptance method.
Where every card has been, on record
Each card is RFID-bound and placed into an environment-controlled slot, with check-in, checkout, return and stocktake driven by WMS/EAP/MES tasks and handoff by manual, AMR, robot or OHT, while capacity and environmental targets are set per project.
Strip and re-weld probes
Cards returned from the fab have damaged or bent probes removed from the substrate and replacement probes welded in before re-entering metrology and electrical test; Probing's cleaning equipment only routes a card to a rework state and its test systems only re-test after repair, so the re-pinning itself is not supplied.
Case, document and ship
The released card is put into its shipping case with desiccant and shock protection, documented, and transported to the customer fab's incoming dock.
Within this room, probe fabrication, incoming sorting, space transformer and PCB fabrication, guide-plate machining, card body integration, packing and shipment, and re-pinning are handled by specialist suppliers, and the equipment for those steps sits outside Probing's supply scope. Every station marked as ours is marked only from what the product pages on this site already state.
Send the sample, installed equipment, current issue and target takt. We will acknowledge receipt within one business day.