Latest Test and Measurement News

aps Solutions sells Chip contacting Technology of ProbeAce in Europe and Israel

19 March 2019 - aps Solutions GmbH (“APS”) announced signing a Memorandum Of Understanding (MOU) with ProbeACE („PA“), an innovative Japanese Probe Card manufacturer, for exclusive Distribution of PA’s contactor technologies in EU and Israel. ProbeAce recently announced their “Fine-Pitch Area-Array Probe-Unit”, a Contactor solution, which is focusing on the increasing market of IoT (Internet of Things) devices as the versatile multi-connection technology as well as FOWLP (Fan-Out Wafer Level Package) package testing.

ProbeAce has succeeded in developing a new Probe Card opening up a new era of wafer level package. ProbeAce has achieved drastic cost reduction on high-performance Probe Cards with new design and manufacturing methods, characterized by a film-shaped probe-and-wire integrated sheet structures in response to increasing demand of cost effective contacting solutions.

To expand the pitch between pins from the wafer-level fine-pitch in the densification area (the Probe Head) to the wider Probe Card PCB technology pitch, ProbeAce uses a proprietary monolithic manufacturing method. Fan-out patterns are seamless formed continuously from each probe to optional test area without any high cost space-transformers/interposers generally used in current probe cards. This characteristic non-discontinuous fan-out pattern structure reduces reflection losses; furthermore designing impedance-matching structures along the signal lines enables superb electrical performance also for RF applications.

Dr. Gunsei Kimoto, President of ProbeAce stated: “With this innovative method, massive probe and fan-out patterns were designed and manufactured significantly cheaper and faster. We have developed a 22.5-um pitch and 30,000-pins-class area-array probe-unit with non-discontinuous fan-out structure without interposer substrates using the monolithic fabrication method and demonstrated the high precision probe array and high productivity.”

“I’m impressed about ProbeAce’ technology for the Semiconductor wafer test, which we now can provide to our customers in Europe and Israel. Working for more than 25 years as Production Manager in large wafer test sites, I was faced with the increasing costs and interfacing complexity of high pin-count and high parallelism Probe Cards as a consumable product for the wafer test – the ProbeAce approach might be a “Game Changer””, said Hanns-Georg Ochsenkuehn, Managing Director of APS.

www.aps-munich.com/