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In daily life, there are a lot of semiconductors surrounding us. Semiconductor is a material that has electrical conductivity weaker than a pure conductor like metal but is stronger than an insulator such as glass. A semiconductor’s resistivity decreases as the temperature increases while metals’ resistivity increases as the temperature increases. There are plenty of useful ways to alter the conductivity of a semiconductor’s properties such as doping which is introducing impurities into the crystal structure. 

One of the most common products of semiconductors is semiconductor devices. It is capable of displaying a variety of useful functions such as directing current more easily in one direction, manipulating resistance, and more. Due to the possibility of modifying the electrical properties of the semiconductor using the doping method, semiconductors devices are capable of being used for amplification, switching and energy conversion. Microcontroller is one example of a semiconductor device. A microcontroller, MCU for short, is a small computer on a single metal-oxide-semiconductor integrated circuit chip. A microcontroller acts as one or multiple computer processor cores along with memory and input and output peripherals that are programmable. Examples of microcontrollers are ROM and RAM. 

While using microcontroller chips, we are required to test it for its connectivity or else it wont work. At times like this, we can conduct a semiconductor test. What is a semiconductor? Semiconductor tests are often known as Microchips (“chips” for short) or Integrated Circuits (ICs) Testers.  Semiconductor test equipment such as IC tester is a system that will give electrical signals to the ic chips to compare its value. The value that the system received will then compare with the expected value of the ic chips. This testing is to determine whether the device is working as it is required according to its design. There are several categories for IC testers and they are logic testers, memory testers and analog testers. Microchips and semiconductor devices can be commonly found in computers, phones and almost everything that contains electronic components. Without doing semiconductor testing before the installation of the microcontroller, it might cause many electronic devices to have non-functional or decreased life spans compared to their expected life spans. 

The most common IC testing are wafer testing and board level testing. In most industries, they would use wafer testing or sometimes also called wafer probing at the production level and before the installation of the chips onto the electronic device. One of the advantages of wafer testers is when the specific die passes the test patterns, the positions will be remembered for further use in IC packaging. This will allow the packaging process to be smoother. After Ic packaging is done, industries will perform the semiconductor test again. This is another advantage of wafer testing as defective devices will be removed and the packaging cost will decrease.

In semiconductor testing, there is one thing that is very important, a probe head. In semiconductor testing, a probe card is a microchip placed in a circuit in order to test its signals. 

A probe head is a device used to connect the semiconductor testing device to the microchips. The probes have a variety of sizes, ranging from simple devices to complex probes that are very expensive but fragile at the same time.  There is a wide selection of probes in the market and the examples of probes are tweezer probes, pogo pins and oscilloscope probes. Spring probes known as pogo pins are widely used in electrical tests to contact component leads. Another type of probes widely used in the electrical tests is the high-voltage probes. This probe’s function is to allow a common multimeter to measure the extremely high voltage that is normally too high for a voltmeter to measure. These probes will reduce the input voltage so that the voltage measuring tools can safely measure the voltage.