Ryan Garrison, Senior Product Business Manager, Probes Business Unit at FormFactor, gave a presentation at a recent COMPASS Virtual Conference titled – 5G mmWave: Multi-site RF Probe Cards Enable Lower Cost-of-test in Mass Production. It is now available on-demand.

First, a little background on the presenter:

Ryan Garrison is a Senior Product Business Manager with FormFactor’s Probes BU focused on RF probing solutions. With nearly 20 years at FormFactor, he has held multiple engineering and leadership roles in operations and the development of Analytical RF Probes, Probe Stations, and now Production RF Probes. His current responsibility centers on the business of expanding RF test parallelism for sub-6 GHz and mmW antenna devices. Most recently Ryan led a team through the development-process-to-product-release of a new probe head effectively doubling the parallelism of RF test using FormFactor’s membrane technology. Prior to joining FormFactor, Ryan graduated from the Oregon State University in Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering.

Presentation Snapshot:

5G mmWave systems are here. Advanced Antenna-in-Package modules and RFFE chipsets are integral to the latest generation of high-end smartphones and tablets, and this capability is becoming more ubiquitous in 2022. These chips, containing a massive amount of mmW content, are ramping in mass production, and the companies producing them need a way to reduce cost of RF test. Our collective challenge spans multiple organizations requiring concerted coordination between sub-systems and immaculate preservation of impedance. Additionally, direct measurement test time is appreciable for advanced-RF devices, which drives the need for more parallel measurement insertions. One converging approach is the use of RF switching on PCB to expand available tester channels and support multi-site probe heads through sequential-parallel testing. To realize actual cost reduction, tester and probe card companies need to evolve quickly to support increased parallelism of mmWave testing.

This session drills down into the RF test cell to examine enhancements enabling increased parallelism using new probe head architectures. The development efforts began by enlarging the active probing area using an advanced membrane process. This new capability created a canvas for RF engineers to develop a host of transmission line structures aimed at high density RF routing from the die to the PCB. Innovation continued – with several loopback options, and a host of new structures to support densification. Another problem uniquely solved with the new membrane, is the ability to support 50 Ohm and non-50 Ohm transmission lines simultaneously to match the impedance needs of the tester and overall performance expectations. We’ll share examples and typical S-parameter performance for several line types during this session.

In closing, this collection of new probe head elements is enabling test engineers to configure their high-volume RF test solutions in novel ways, and we are eager to equip the industry with new test possibilities.

To watch this presentation – and other COMPASS talks – visit the COMPASS website.