Fabrication of a Silicon Micro-Probe for Vertical Probe Card Application

We report on the fabrication of a new type of probe card that uses a porous silicon micromachining technique. Curled cantilever tips are fabricated using surface tension and the difference in the thermal expansion coefficient between the films. The contact resistance of cantilever tips with an aluminum pad is basically below 1 Ω and there is no change of contact resistance after 700,000 contacts.