Probe Card and Prober Chuck Cleaning

In wafer test, the prober brings each die up to the probe card’s tips thousands of times an hour. Every touchdown leaves a little pad metal and oxide on the tips, and every wafer can carry particles onto the prober chuck. Both show up the same way: contact resistance drifts, good die start to fail, and yield on the test floor drops for reasons that have nothing to do with the silicon.

Cleaning the probe card

Most probers clean the card on-line. A sheet of cleaning material sits on the cleaning plate beside the chuck, and the prober touches the card down on it every set number of die. The material has to remove debris without blunting the tips or leaving residue. Abrasive polymer films, lapping films and foams each suit different probe types and temperatures. Off-line cleaning at the bench recovers a card that has drifted too far.

Cleaning the prober chuck

Particles on the chuck tilt the wafer against the card, which throws out the alignment and can damage the probes. A chuck cleaning wafer runs through the prober like a test wafer and lifts the particles off, so the chuck doesn’t have to be opened and cleaned by hand, which matters most when it’s running hot or cold.

What we supply

SiSTEM supplies Entegris probe card cleaning materials and chuck cleaning wafers in the UK and Ireland, and holds the most-used parts in stock. Tell us your probe card, prober and test temperature and we’ll suggest where to start.