Patent ID: 6870382

Claim:
A method of evaluating the planarity of an array of probe tips on a probe card and parallelism of the array of probe tips relative to a selected surface, comprising: moving the probe tip array and the selected surface relative to each other in spaced increments; testing for electrical contact between at least some of the probe tips and the selected surface for at least some of the increments; for each probe tip tested at a given increment, recording whether electrical contact occurs between the tested probe tips and the selected surface; sorting the recorded data to create a sorted data group comprising a shortest distance where electrical contact occurred between each probe tip tested and the selected surface during the testing; and plotting the sorted data group on a three dimensional cartesian coordinate system, wherein x and y values for each data point generally correlate to a location of a corresponding probe tip relative to the other probe tips, and wherein a z value for each data point is a shortest distance where electrical contact occurred between the corresponding probe tip and the selected surface during the testing.