Design and fabrication of Electroplating Nickel Micromachined Probe with out-of-plane predeformation

This paper present a new type of electroplating Nickel micromachined probes with out-of-plane predeformation for the next generation integrated circuit (IC) chip testing probe card application. It was fabricated using silicon bulk etching, Ti deposition and Ni electroplating process. We use the residual stress effect of thin films deposition to cause the flexible micromachined probe with a large out-of-plane predeformation and combine postelectroplating technique to further increase beam's thickness and therefore enhance its stiffness. The typical micromachined probe had a thickness 5∼10 μm, a width of 20 μm, and a length of 100 μm. The maximum deflection of the fabricated Nickel probe beam was 28 μm. This micromachined probe is capable of providing a very larger number of testing probe card, including the array pad format, and this designed also to satisfy the requirements for high frequency, high resolution and low cost wafer-level testing..