Full Description

FormFactor, Inc. (FormFactor), incorporated on April 15, 1993, designs, develops, manufactures, sells and supports precision semiconductor wafer probe cards. The Company has facilities in United States, Japan, Germany, Taiwan, Italy, South Korea and Singapore and the People's Republic of China. Semiconductor manufacturers use the Company’s wafer probe cards to perform wafer sort and test on the semiconductor die, or chips, on the whole semiconductor wafer prior to singulation of the wafer into individual chips. FormFactor offers products and solutions that are custom designed for semiconductor manufacturers’ wafer designs. FormFactor’s products are based on its technologies, including its MicroSpring interconnect technology and design tools. The Company’s MicroSpring interconnect technology, which includes resilient spring-like contact elements, enables it to produce wafer probe cards for applications that require reliability, speed, precision and signal integrity. FormFactor manufactures its MicroSpring contact elements through precision micro-machining and scalable semiconductor-like wafer fabrication processes. Its MicroSpring contacts are springs that optimize the relative amounts of force on, and across, a bond pad during the test process and maintain their shape and position over a range of compression.

MicroSpring contacts enable the Company’s wafer probe cards to make touchdowns with minimal maintenance for device applications. The MicroSpring contact can be attached to surfaces, or substrates, including printed circuit boards, silicon wafers, ceramics and various metalized surfaces. FormFactor’s MicroSpring contacts include geometrically precise tip structures. These tip structures are the parts of its wafer probe cards that come into physical, contact with the devices being tested, and are manufactured using micro-machining semiconductor-like processes. These tip structures enable precise contact with small bond pad sizes and pitches. The Company’s technology allows for the design of specific geometries of the contact tip that deliver precise and predictable electrical contact for a customer’s particular application.

FormFactor’s wafer probe cards are custom products that are designed to order for its customers’ wafer designs. For parallelism memory test applications, the Company’s products require large area contact array sizes. Its technology enables probe cards for certain applications to be populated with over 40,000 contacts. The Company has developed wafer probe cards that use array sizes ranging from 50 millimeter x 50 millimeter up to array sizes suitable for contacting all die on a 300 millimeter wafer simultaneously, in combination with complex multi-layer printed circuit boards that the Company has designed.

In November 2008, it introduced DC-Boost technology for its customers for test efficiency by enabling the test of more devices on a single wafer simultaneously. In December 2008, the Company introduced The Harmony eXP full-wafer contact solution, the culmination of several platform improvements to support 300 mm DRAM wafer test requirements. The new Harmony eXP solution incorporates mechanical enhancements to improve planarity (touch all contacts on an even plane), includes a new MicroSpring contactor design to enable pad pitches as small as 60 microns, and allows a 20% reduction in pad size compared to previous generation Harmony products.

The Company competes Advantest Corporation, Aehr Test Systems, AMST Co., Ltd., Cascade Microtech, Inc., Feinmetall GmbH, Korea Instrument Co., Ltd., Japan Electronic Materials Corporation, SV Probe, Inc., Micronics Japan Co., Ltd., Microfriend Inc., Technoprobe Asia Pte. Ltd., MicroProbe, Inc., Phicom Corporation, Tokyo Cathode Laboratory Co., Ltd., Tokyo Electron Ltd., Touchdown Technologies, Inc., TSE Co., Ltd. and Wentworth Laboratories, Inc.