This technology reduces the cost of testing electronic chips while enabling tests on high density chips and systems-on-a-chip, which are increasing in importance as portable devices increase in the market. The non-contact coupling of the probes eliminates many of the problems associated with state of the art tests. Testing is a major cost in the microelectronics industry, and represents a major opportunity for reducing chip costs, especially as more powerful chips move into mobile devices.
Description: Optical structures such as optical gratings and detectors implemented as surface plasmon polariton structures are used in order to allow non-contact optical coupling of test cards to chips. The technology replaces test heads that use many contact pins and high pressure. The chips being tested only require the addition of a few optical structures. This will bring enormous benefits to the microelectronics industry, which is expected to spend $ 4 billion on probe cards alone by 2017. It will bring the following benefits to this market: