Article Reprint

RF (Gigahertz) ATE Production Testing On-Wafer: Options and Tradeoffs

Reprinted with permission of IEEE. Copyright 1999 by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers. This paper was presented by Dean Gahagan of Cascade Microtech at the 1999 International Test Conference. This paper describes the hardware solution tradeoffs in testing RF devices on-wafer in a production environment using ATE. The options, which are available today, will be compared with respect to RF measurement integrity and production worthiness.

Introduction

The ever-increasing demand for more bandwidth to support the exploding Internet and the insatiable need for PCS (personal communication systems)/cellular devices has driven manufacturers of high speed digital and RF devices to push RF test of these devices upstream to the wafer level for a variety of reasons. Internet user demand for bandwidth is doubling every four months, while providers are only able to double bandwidth access every fourteen months. Worldwide sales of cellular telephones were in the hundreds of millions in 1998. The high volume demand of these devices necessitates the most economical production path to market.

Why RF test on-wafer?

The relentless push for IC cost reduction has quickly driven cost-sensitive RFIC integration levels from single-function parts in 1995 to full front ends and simple handset functions on a chip today [ref 1]. Small RFICs are usually packaged with little or no RF test (sometimes not even a DC sort), and typically packaged in cheap SOIC packages. The only RF testing is done at final test, since package scrap costs are very low, although sample testing for RF functionality before assembly is useful to ensure that there are no bad lots in the packaging queue. As the IC complexities have increased, the yields are lower and the package costs are higher, creating a need for screening before packaging to save package scrap. In the future, integration levels will continue to rise, and package inductance requirements will imply chip-scale packages (CSPs) and/or flip-chip assembly with known-good die (KGD). Figure 1 illustrates this evolution. 1995: SSI parts in SOPs
PCM Test Sample RF Test At Wafer Level Dice & Package 100% Final Test In Package

1998: MSI parts in plastic or BGA

PCM Test 100% RF Test At Wafer Level Dice & Package 100% RF Or Connectivity Test In Package

2001: MSI or LSI as CSP or KGD

PCM Test 100% RF Test At Wafer Level Singulate Die

Fig. 1. Current and predicted test flows for RFICs.

High-performance RFICs, such as military/aerospace or SONET applications, are typically packaged in more expensive packages or modules, necessitating RF screening at the wafer level for KGD. Virtually no RFICs are burned in today. In the past 15 years, wafer probing above one GHz has progressed from impossible, to a useful R&D tool, to a necessary production tool, to a mainstream VLSI topic. In the early 1980s, it was common knowledge that you could not get good measurements from a wafer probe at high frequencies. In the late 80s, the GaAs MMIC community had adopted the first ceramic-based microwave probes as a necessary tool for device and IC development. By the early 90s, production microwave and high-speed ICs bound for expensive modules or packages were being 100% RF probed before assembly. In the late 90s, mainstream CMOS now routinely achieves 30 GHz fT, allowing large ICs that operate at 500 MHz clock rates and higher. These high-value chips are often packaged in expensive multi-chip modules (MCMs), requiring known-good-die (KGD) screening in production at microwave bandwidths on tens, and soon hundreds, of signal and power contacts.

Required Measurements

The RF and IF measurements required, test times, number of RF channels supported and bandwidth of measurements are all parameters that influence a test engineers hardware choices for ATE. Figure 2 is a list of the measurements that a RFIC designer may wish to perform in verifying or characterizing an IC. A different subset of these would typically be performed, depending upon the type of device under test (DUT), e.g., passive filters, amplifiers, mixers or power amplifiers. Classically these measurements have been done with rack-and-stack RF test gear.
Fig. 2. Typical RF and IF measurements made on a RF device AM-PM conversion (static) Adjacent channel power Complex demodulation Digital input-threshold voltage Digital output levels Efficiency (RF out/DC in) Frequency cw vs time (tune drift) Gain or loss vs control voltage or digital state Gain compression Pout @ N dB, saturation Harmonic distortion dBc SOI, TOI I/Q modulator imbalance (static) amplitude & phase error I/Q modulator suppression carrier & unwanted sideband Isolation Minimum detectable signal Mixer conversion gain or loss Mixer leakages LO-->RF, LO-->IF, carrier feedthrough Noise figure Nth order intermodulation two-tone IP3, IP5 Phase noise/jitter (cw) modulated Power (dBm) output power vs bias voltage Pulsed RF measurements frequency power S-parameters Pulsed RF profile signal overshoot & ringing RF rise time (10% to 90%) S-parameters gain/loss isolation, match, VSWR, gamma Spurious signals @ known frequency, search Supply currents enabled, sleep mode Switching speed D digital input to D gain or D frequency VCO frequency vs voltage tune linearity tune range tune sensitivity (dc-freq) vs digital state Voltages VSWR

HP 84000 RF test configuration

Recently, RF ATE systems have become readily available that integrate all of these functions and provide a much higher throughput capability than typical rack-andstack equipment. These RF ATE systems with various options are available from numerous companies. Agilent Technologies, Teradyne, LTX, Roos, Advantest, TMT, and Credence all offer giga-hertz testers. The details of these measurements are beyond the scope of this paper, but all of the ATE vendors will provide application and benchmarking information for these measurements. The major trade-offs one needs to be aware of are number and quality of RF ports offered, number of synthesized RF sources, the amount of RF output power, and number of DC and AC channels. Types of measurements the system can do and the software interface are critical needs the production test engineer has to understand. The system architecture is pivotal to the level of calibration one can do on the system and the interfacing components that mate the ATE to the DUT. Most take a tiered approach where the first tier is the test head (sometimes referred to as the docking head) and subsequent tiers are for the various pieces of interface hardware.

Tester to Probe Card Interfaces

Usually three options can be used to interface the test head to the probe card. 1) Cabling from the test head to the probe card is an option where there is no requirement of a docking or test head that has to be positioned on and off the probe station. 2) A probe interface board (PIB or sometimes referred to as a tester load board) with a mechanical fixture that ties the load board and the probe card together is another way of interfacing to the test head. 3) The last option is a probe board that mates directly to the test head. Measurement requirements, easy configurations, production worthiness, and cost are trade offs when you make this choice. Cabled interface, tower fixture, and a direct dock interface will be the terms that will be referred to in this paper. Cabled Interface Major advantages of the cabled interface are flexibility in configuring your tester for many different types of devices and typically lower cost. Cost saving occurs from not having to carry an inventory of expensive load boards, pogo-pin towers, and other hardware in stock to test different applications or devices. There is also no requirement for a manipulator to move the test head on and off the probe station. Major disadvantages are the complexity of changing from one device to another in a production environment. There is an additional cost here of having a skilled person available on the production floor that can change all of the complex connections and then do some type of calibration or verification that the system is operating properly and making the correct measurements. From an RF measurement standpoint there is usually some cable loss associated with this type of interface and there is a real risk of having intermittent connections at the connectors if they fail or are not tightened properly. The test engineer has to make the decision whether the RF loss through the cables can be removed through calibration or whether the output power from the tester or the DUT is sufficient to overcome all of the losses through the cable and probe card.

Tower interface

Tower interface with theta adjustment

Tower Fixture The tower fixture has a load board that usually has blind-mate RF connectors, which provide the first interconnect of a RF signal to or from the test head. Blindmate connectors can tolerate some mis-alignment tolerance of the tower fixture to the test head and still provide a good RF connection. DC and AC connections to the test head are accomplished by either a pogo-pin configuration or some type of square pin connection arrangement. Some type of mechanical guide and locking mechanism ensures proper mechanical alignment and mating of this fixture to the test head. A theta adjust is also provided on some systems. Board real estate is the major advantage of using a load board instead of just direct docking the probe card to the test head. Any custom circuitry that is critical to being close to the test head but not to the DUT can be placed on the tester load board, which can be application or device specific. Components can consist of relays, bias tees, transformers, test head terminations, filters, amplifiers, or any other passive or active component the test of the device requires. Semi-rigid or flexible coax can be used to route RF lines from the load board to the probe board. Semi-rigid provides a loss advantage as well as mechanical and thermal stability. Flex cable is an easier routing solution. The shorter the tower, the less loss in the cables. Tower configurations are usually the most costly as you have a load board, the mechanical and electrical configuration between the two boards, and the probe card. Once this tower is assembled for a given DUT, it usually remains together until some repair is required. Spare towers are a costly but necessary inventory in a high volume production environment. Manipulator arms are usually required in the tower setup to lift the test head and tower interface off the probe station. The real benefit of a tower interface is it allows you almost the same flexibility as the cabled interface, yet provides an assembly that is very easy to set up, reliable in a high volume production environment, and maintains good RF performance. RF losses are minimized, and insertion loss and delay can be calibrated out in the frequency domain, moving the reference plane of the measurement out to the probe tips. Individual wires, ribbon cable, or even coax (to reduce noise on these lines) are accept ways of connecting the DC and AC signals from one end of the tower to the other. Direct Docking Interfacing the probe card directly to the test head has some distinct advantages. The probe card has blind-mate RF connectors that mate directly to the test head. RF losses are minimized and the ability to take a probe card off the shelf and easily attach it to the test head makes this solution the most beneficial in a production environment. An inventory of probe cards can be maintained with a minimum of cost where there is no elaborate mechanical fixtures and no expensive and complex load boards. The disadvantage of this type of interface is the only place supporting components for the IC or circuitry needed to customize the test or test head is on the probe card. There is also no mechanical isolation between the test head and the probe station.

Probe Cards

The performance of the probe card is sometimes the least understood section of the entire measurement system. Hundreds of man hours of engineering and hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars are spent on the tester design, the test head, the load board and tower interface, the manipulator, and the software to execute a test sequence. A minimal amount of effort is usually spent on the probe card design and is usually saved until last when the wafer is in fabrication and the die pads are fixed. With all of the careful RF design considerations taken into account with the rest of the measurement system, the probe card is truly where the rubber meets the road. A great deal of effort is spent in controlling parasitics, bypassing, and controlling impedances in designing a package so this device works to its maximum performance. This consideration should also be taken when looking at the design of a probe card. If this care is not taken, all of your measurement quality paid for in the tester could be lost as all I/O signals from the DUT pass through the probe card.
Parameter Maximum pad count Parallel test? RF line bandwidth Common-lead Inductance Single-ground crosstalk @ 2 GHz Epoxy-ring Needle Card 500 No 1 GHz (best case) 10 20 nH < -1 dB Coax plus Needles Card 80 No 110 GHz 3 8 nH -1 to 4 dB RFIC PyramidTM Probe Card 800 Yes 110 GHz 0.4 0.2 nH -20 to 26 dB

Quadrant coaxial and blade probes

Table 1 Performance comparison of different probe card technologies

The card has blind-mate RF connectors that mate directly to the test head

Table 1 compares the available technologies for RFIC probe cards. Any of these technologies achieve losses (attenuation) that are low enough to be corrected in any RF measurement. The problem becomes the other fixturing parasitics. The return loss of a typical needle card is not suitable at 2 GHz, since this does not achieve an uncorrected return loss for the whole system of at least 10 dB. The coax plus needles or a pyramid card easily achieves the return loss corrections. The line-to-line crosstalk of a needle card is also unacceptable since the crosstalk is not correctable in most microwave measurements. The coax plus needle cards achieves good coupled-line crosstalk, but there is an RF signal density constraint of at least 500 m just to fit the coax lines near the probe tips. The RFIC probe cards achieve by far the best coupled-line crosstalk. The common lead inductance is much too high in a typical needle probe, either for the ground or powers, and it is also way too high in a coax plus needles card arrangement. Only the RFIC Pyramid probe card achieves the inductance control for accurate emulation of package parasitics. [Ref 2] Power bypassing on a probe card is crucial in delivering clean power and low ground inductance to the DUT. Needle and coaxial probe cards do not allow bypass capacitors to be placed close enough to the DUT and when one tries to put them close, there is still a considerable amount of lead inductance between the device and the bypass capacitor. The membrane probe allows low impedance microstrip lines to connect bypass capacitors between power and ground. The ground inductance on the membrane card is sometimes an order of magnitude or less than other types of probe cards. Measurement repeatability and correlation are essential in high volume production testing.

Bottom of Pyramid Probe card

Photolithiographical probe cards are inherently the same from probe card to probe card. RFIC probe card options are limited to blade needle cards with coax probe blades, or membrane-style probes. Coaxial blade cards are able to contact three or four widely-spaced single-ended RF ports through 110 GHz, but have poor ground and power bypassing parasitics. Above about 1 GHz, membrane-style probes are the only option offering high density, low power and ground impedances, or element integration close to the IC pads.

Calibration

Most of the major ATE systems for RF production testing have some capability of performing calibration corrections to the measurements at the test head, the fixture interface, and the probe card. Most use a tiered approach where a test head calibration board is inserted into the test head to calibrate the ATE. A standard for the interface can then be used to calibrate out standard test interface fixtures or probe cards. Calibration standards on-wafer or on a calibration substrate can then be used to calibrate down to the probe tips. A short, an open, a load and a thru are then required to perform a full VNA calibration. There are different algorithms (LRM, LRRM, SOLT, SOLR) used to calculate the calibration coefficients. The ATE systems either have scalar or vector analysis capability.

Calibration plane (@ precision blindmate connectors)

Measurement calibration with calibration boards De-embed Loss Phase shift Mismatch

Measurement plane (@ probe tips)

ED ET

ES

Calibration plane extended to probe tips with de-embedding

Scalar network analyzer (SNA) or power meter setup normalized for cable and/or fixture losses will correct for the losses but be in error to the extent that the DUT reflections are different from the calibration through reflections. A VNA will correct for both losses and reflections, but only if the DUT is linear. (A rule of thumb is that the VNA can improve the uncorrected measurement system directivity by about 20 dB.) Most importantly, there are no practical general methods of correcting any microwave measurements for crosstalk of any type. If forced, you can simulate the IC with different inductances or couplings, but the simplest approach is to use probe cards and fixturing with low crosstalk. The effects of series inductances of the input or output leads can be added or removed from measurements relatively easily, but the effects of common-lead impedances are very difficult to correct even in the easiest cases. The best solution is to carefully control the actual probe card and fixture inductances and power supply impedances.

General purpose membrane impedance standard substrate

Probe Stations

EG 4090 autoprober

Probe stations are another key piece of hardware in making good quality and repeatable RF measurements in a production environment. Automated wafer handling, calibration functions, testing devices at temperature, low noise environments, automatic probe to pad alignment, and software integration to the ATE test executive are all functions needed to perform different RF measurements discussed above. ElectroGlas, TSK, TEL, and Cascade Microtech manufacture fully automated production probe stations capable of performing these functions. Thinned GaAs wafers require careful handling by automatic probe stations. Robotic arms are capable of this task. Auxiliary chucks should be available to place calibration substrates near the chuck so calibration can be performed on a regular basis. Enclosing the wafer in chamber allows a controlled temperature environment and minimizes external noise for critical RF measurements such as noise figure. Calibration software integrated with the probe station can be beneficial to ensure critical calibration coefficients are measured properly and downloaded to the ATE.

Summary/Conclusions

A good understanding of required measurements and knowledge of options for the total solution are required to make essential tradeoffs between quality of measurements, production worthiness and cost in making good decisions for on-wafer RF production test. The optimal solution is device specific in nature and the final configuration should take into consideration the applications that a manufacturer needs to perform on those devices. Multiple vendors are available for most pieces of the entire system. Some ATE vendors support integrated cells and take responsibility for the total solution. RF wafer test is emerging and production-ready tools are generally becoming available. Literature references [Ref 1] E. Strid, Roadmapping RFIC Test, 1998 GaAs IC Symposium Technical Digest, pp. 3-6. [Ref 2] E. Strid, Trends in RF Devices and ICs for Wireless Applications, IEDM Short Course, p. 41 Texas Instrument, Michael Janssen, Microwave Probetest Evaluation on Teradyne A585 HP84000 Series, RFIC Test Systems, Randy McBride, A.02.00 RF Wafer Test Capability Contribution is to describe practical HW options for on wafer production RF test and to compare these options with respect to RF Performance and Production Worthiness.

 1999 IEEE. Reprinted, with permission, from an article presented by Dean Gahagan of Cascade Microtech at the International Test Conference in 1999.

AR134-0701 Data subject to change without notice