SBIR Phase I: Fully-Automated Non-contact Probe System for On-wafer MillimeterWave and THz Electronics

这个小型企业创新研究第一阶段项目将开发一种新的、全自动化、非接触式测量系统，该系统准确、可重复且经济高效，可全面表征高性能电子、光子学、微流体和生物医学设备技术。创新的非接触式解决方案不存在困扰接触式探头系统的传统磨损问题。这项拟议的技术可以开辟新的研究领域和方向，可能会对整个半导体行业产生立竿见影的好处，从而广泛影响我们“信息驱动”社会的所有领域。特别是，毫米波和太赫兹频段(30-3000 GHz)提供了独特的解决方案，以解决传感和光谱、医疗、制药和安全成像以及极高数据速率、无处不在的通信中的关键问题。在上述领域，迫切需要全电子集成系统，以实现紧凑和成本效益高的应用。更重要的是，这些新的高性能设备的测试和表征在它们预期的工作频率上一直是一个挑战。因此，需要全面、高性能的计量系统来自动表征整个电子晶片，而无需进行物理接触。本文提出的自动测头系统首次实现了快速、准确的器件和芯片表征，而无需与测试晶片进行物理接触。该项目的智能优点是一种新型的非接触式测头系统，该系统通过与测试设备单片集成的片上天线将测试信号无线耦合到测试晶片上。由于消除了与测试晶片的物理接触，因此不会对芯片或测试台造成磨损，显著提高了可靠性和重复性，并消除了大量相关的测试成本。这一创新的解决方案是可扩展的，首次为单模或差模晶片上表征提供了全面、优雅且经济高效的解决方案。虽然片上天线的物理尺寸比典型的接触探头着陆台略大，但这种创新方法在操作、劳动力和维护方面的总体成本节约很容易超过集成天线占用的片上空间。或许更重要的是，这一新颖的测试台能够对整个电子晶片上的每个芯片进行全自动、无人值守的测试，甚至能够在没有用户参与的情况下连续处理多个晶片，从而显著节省高速电子设备的总体测试成本。

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will develop a novel, fully-automated, non-contact metrology system that is accurate, repeatable, and cost-effective for comprehensive characterization of high-performance electronics, photonics, micro-fluidics, and biomedical device technologies. The innovative non-contact solution is free of the conventional wear and tear issues plaguing contact-based probing systems. The proposed technique could open up new research areas and directions that could have an immediate benefit to the entire semiconductor industry, thus broadly impacting all areas of our "information-driven" society. In particular, millimeter-wave and terahertz frequency bands (30-3000GHz) offer unique solutions to address key problems in sensing and spectroscopy, medical, pharmaceutical and security imaging, as well as extremely-high-data rate, ubiquitous communications. All-electronic integrated systems are badly needed for compact and cost effective applications in the above-mentioned areas. More importantly, testing and characterization of these new high-performance devices has been a challenge at their intended operation frequencies. Thus, there is ample need for comprehensive, high-performance metrology systems for characterizing entire electronic wafers automatically and without making physical contact. The automated probe system proposed here enables, for the first time, fast and accurate device and chip characterization, without making physical contact with the test wafer.The intellectual merit of this project is a novel non-contact probe system, based on wireless coupling of the test signals onto the test wafer, through on-chip antennas that are monolithically integrated with the test device. Since the physical contact to the test wafer is eliminated, there is no wear & tear to the chip or the test-bed, significantly improving reliability and repeatability as well as eliminating much of the associated testing costs. This innovative solution is scalable, and offers a comprehensive, elegant and cost-effective solution for single or differential-mode on-wafer characterization for the first time. Although the physical size of the on-chip antennas are slightly larger than typical contact-probe landing pads, the overall cost-savings in operation, labor, and maintenance offered by this innovative approach readily outweighs the on-chip real-estate occupied by the integrated antennas. Perhaps more importantly, this novel test-bed enables fully-automated, unattended testing of every single chip on an entire electronic wafer, even enabling continuous processing of multiple wafers without user involvement, thus providing significant savings in overall testing costs for high-speed electronic devices.