FormFactor’s products and support will enable PSC to rapidly ramp production, control 300mm equipment investment

LIVERMORE, Calif. – March 3, 2003 —FormFactor announced today that Powerchip Semiconductor Corporation (PSC), a leading memory chip manufacturer, has qualified FormFactor’s advanced PH100 wafer test probe card and FormFactor’s new Tester Resource Extension (TRETM) probing technology solution for its 300mm DRAM wafer manufacturing facility based in Hsinchu Science Based Park in Taiwan. FormFactor’s TRE probing technology increases tester capacity and improves overall equipment efficiency, enabling PSC to significantly reduce its wafer test investment and accelerate the return on its new manufacturing facility investment.

The qualification at PSC successfully closes the first engagement of FormFactor’s new professional services team. FormFactor’s professional services team, in cooperation with application engineers from FormFactor’s Taiwan distributor, Spirox, played a significant role in helping PSC successfully design a high-parallelism wafer test solution and ramp its 300mm fabrication facility on time. FormFactor’s professional services team ensures the company’s proprietary TRE probing technology solution is optimized for each customer’s specific wafer test application and that critical production volume ramp milestones are met.

“High-parallelism probing is a requirement to control the cost of wafer test for 300mm DRAM manufacturers,” stated Mark Brandemuehl, FormFactor’s vice president of marketing. “However, successful high-parallelism wafer test requires close coordination between test FormFactor Provides Wafer Test Solution to PSC methodologies, test hardware and the wafer test probe card design. If a high-parallelism 300mm wafer test project is unsuccessful, the cost of increased tester purchases and lost production can be staggering. Powerchip’s qualification of the FormFactor solution – on time and on budget – demonstrates the power of providing services, beyond probe card design and manufacturing, to create wafer test solutions that are delivered on time and significantly reduce cost of test for 300mm wafer manufacturers.”

FormFactor’s new TRE probing technology solution includes probe card design innovations that allow customers to make better use of FormFactor’s advanced MicroSpringTM interconnect based wafer probe cards by increasing parallelism, thereby reducing touchdowns. Fewer touchdowns lead to greater throughput and reduced cost of test. FormFactor’s probe card products for 300mm DRAM test include the PH100 probe card that enables testing in just nine touchdowns, and the PH150 probe card that enables testing in just six touchdowns.