Evaluation of a Spring Probe Card Solution for 5G WLCSP Applications

The new 5G wireless standard brings several new challenges for many applications, especially for the wafer level chip scale packaging (WLCSP) technology. WLCSP has been a very successful technology for handheld and portable products. To make the right decisions in the early stages of probe card design for the mmWave frequencies wafer test, the electromagnetic (EM) simulation of the probe card performance is inevitable. Critical is an understanding of the dependencies and relationships between the many interacting probe card parts such as probe head, PCB, and coaxial connectors. This paper describes the challenges in wafer testing for 5G applications and presents the author's experience in the implementation of spring probe cards for 5G mmWave frequencies. This paper presents a spring probe card for 5G technology as a low-cost alternative RF wafer test solution and examines 3D EM computer model simulation results.