Spring -がロードされたPogoTestピン

A lot of the stuff that we've been involved with is definitely at the advanced nodes. The massive parallelism of these devices is driving people to use the most advanced silicon nodes, especially for the logic part of it. We've seen some projects that are mind-boggling in terms of die size and transistor count. For a probe card manufacturer, that drives a very large number of probes. To get all of the power in, there are some thermal control issues associated with the test. But that whole test interface for logic chips is now approaching the numbers and scale that we saw in memory only a few years ago. State-of-the-art memory probe cards a few years ago had maybe 50,000 or 60,000 probes per card. We're shipping probe cards with that number of probes to test some of these AI engines, as well. The scale of these things is astounding.

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Spring -がロードされたPogoTestピン

私たちの技術は、I / Oに接続して電源を入れるためのミクロン-レベルの精度でプローブを製造する方法を提供します。プローブの精度特性により、プローブは、最先端の-エッジ半導体プロセスノードのファインピッチ、ピン数の多い要件、および高度なパッケージングに最適ですが、すべてのプローブが同じように作成されているわけではありません。クラッドメタル技術を活用して、さまざまな新しいICフロンティアエレクトロニクスの革新を可能にします。

Spinrg-loaded Pogo test Pins

Spring -がロードされたPogoTestピン

These are some very, very large die. When you think about the density and the sheer power you need to get into the chip, and then the number of interfaces it has to the outside world — these are very complicated interfaces, and therefore very complicated tests and test tooling. FormFactor made some really big investments in MEMS probe technology, which is the only cost-effective way to get to the kind of densities and performance levels that people need to test these kinds of chips. There are technical challenges, but it's a really interesting field to be in because you're working with some of the leading customers in the world to push this forward.

Pin Probe

Spring -がロードされたPogoTestピン

For the test part of the business, with any given engagement you got a very interesting customer set. It's usually multiple entities at different geographic locations that you are working with at the same time. There is the fabless design house, the foundry, and depending on where the test is being done, there can be a testing house, too. And a lot of the test program development does go into some of the spaces of algorithm development and then how the end system is going to be deployed. There are a lot of engagements where you don't have one customer. You have three customers for a single design. And everybody has to work together and communicate well for these things to work.

Plated Gold Pogo Pin Probe

Spring -がロードされたPogoTestピン

A lot of those challenges are the same themes we've seen as we've gone from 20nm down to the first nodes, and then to 10 and 7nm. One of the biggest test challenges customers have is the combination of power density and thermal control — trying to make sure that as they test the chip, the transistors and the overall chip are operating at temperatures that are consistent with regular use cases. You can run a set of test vectors through a chip and produce an immense amount of heat, which then causes some weird physical interactions with the overall test. And so both thermal control, as it relates to throughput and test strategies, and then the amount of current you're able to get in and out of the chip, are some of the biggest challenges we see at those advanced logic nodes. There is tremendous power density.

Probe pogo pin