FormFactor Brand Guidelines: MicroSpring Probe Cards, Livermore & Cascade Microtech

A researcher’s second start-up.

FormFactor was started in April 1993 by Igor Khandros, according to the International Directory of Company Histories. Khandros, a metallurgist with a doctorate from the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey, had worked at IBM’s Yorktown research centre and in 1990 had started Tessera Technologies, a chip-scale packaging company; FormFactor was his second start-up. English Wikipedia places the founding in Elmsford, New York.

The idea was a new kind of wafer probe card. A probe card is the interface between a finished silicon wafer and the test equipment: it touches the chips while they are still on the wafer, before the wafer is cut into individual dies. Traditional cards used metal needles. FormFactor’s MicroSpring contacts, the directory explains, were thousands of microscopic springs made from gold wire coated with a nickel alloy, and the technology allowed many chips to be tested at once.

After about two years of development the company set up its headquarters and manufacturing in Livermore, California, in 1995 and introduced its first wafer probe card that year, the directory says; venture investors funded the private years. FormFactor completed its initial public offering on Nasdaq, under the ticker FORM, in June 2003, English Wikipedia says. Silicon Semiconductor reported in April 2009 that Khandros had taken the company public, had served as chief executive from 1993 until 2008, when Mario Ruscev took the role, and had received the SEMI Award for North America in 2006; he left the board on 1 May 2009.

Memory cards, full-wafer test and Cascade.

Memory makers were an early market. English Wikipedia credits FormFactor with the first x64 DRAM probe card in 2000, followed by an x128 DRAM card in 2002, and says it shipped its first SmartMatrix full-wafer probe cards in February 2009. By the mid-2000s, the directory notes, the company had offices in Tokyo and Yokohama, Seoul, Dresden, Munich, Milan and Jubei in Taiwan. In a company statement quoted by the directory at that time, FormFactor said it offered wafer test products for 200 mm and 300 mm wafers to manufacturers of DRAM, flash memory and microprocessors.

Growth then came through purchases, English Wikipedia records. In October 2012 FormFactor signed an agreement with Astria Semiconductors Holdings to acquire MicroProbe. In October 2019 it bought FRT, a German company, whose FRT Metrology business was later acquired by Camtek in October 2023. In July 2020 it acquired the probe card assets of Advantest, and in October 2020 it bought High Precision Devices. An additional manufacturing facility opened in Livermore in 2021.

The largest purchase was Cascade Microtech of Beaverton, Oregon. English Wikipedia tells its origin: in the early 1980s two Tektronix engineers, Eric Strid and K. Reed Gleason, could not persuade their managers to build a microwave wafer probe for testing chips, but Tektronix licensed the technology to them. They formed Cascade Microtech on a part-time basis in 1982 — the article’s summary gives 1983, the year of its first product — and all had left Tektronix by 1985. Cascade listed on Nasdaq in December 2004, bought the socket maker Gryphics in 2007, acquired SUSS MicroTec’s chip-testing division in January 2010 and bought ATT Advanced Temperature Test Systems in October 2013. Its sale to FormFactor was announced in February 2016 and closed in June 2016. English Wikipedia says Cascade’s production takes place in Beaverton and in Dresden, Germany.

Design and documentation.

Test and measurement companies sell instruments that most people never see, and their marketing is built around the screen. Product pages and brochures tend to lead with an oscilloscope display: a dark background, a fine grid of divisions and bright traces in yellow, cyan, magenta and green, each colour standing for a separate channel. The trace is the product’s face, so photographs are often cropped tight on the display rather than on the case around it.

The second familiar image is the laboratory. Signal and spectrum analysers, generators and power supplies appear stacked in racks or lined up on a bench, cables looping between front panels of knobs, soft keys and connectors. Engineers are shown probing a circuit board with a fine tip, reading a waveform while the device under test sits under a lamp or a magnifier. The tone is calm and technical, with product names and model numbers set in plain sans type.

Further along the chain, the pictures move into the factory. Semiconductor test makers show automated chip testers and handlers in clean production areas, staff in protective suits, and wafer probe cards photographed under magnification, where rows of needle-like contacts meet the pads of a chip. Network and wireless test companies favour antennas, fibre spools, base stations and phones in shielded boxes.

The category also meets its customers in person. Trade shows such as electronica in Munich, DesignCon in Santa Clara and Mobile World Congress in Barcelona are where new instruments are launched and demonstrated live, so stand design, demo screens and printed data sheets carry much of each brand’s visual identity. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — who founded it, who owns it and where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests on the company’s own word.

From Livermore to Beaverton and Dresden.

Recent moves have pointed toward advanced packaging and optics. In February 2025, Evertiq reported, FormFactor announced that it would join the private equity firm MBK Partners in acquiring FICT, a Japanese maker of circuit boards and substrates for semiconductor test equipment, from Advantage Partners, with MBK to hold 80 percent and FormFactor 20 percent and a seat on the board; FormFactor announced on 21 February 2025 that the transaction had closed. On 15 December 2025 FormFactor announced the acquisition of Keystone Photonics, a long-term partner whose optical probing technology serves wafer testing of silicon photonics and co-packaged optics, Converge Digest reported.

The headquarters remains in Livermore. English Wikipedia lists manufacturing facilities and offices in the United States — among them Beaverton in Oregon, Boulder in Colorado, Carlsbad and San Jose in California and Woburn in Massachusetts — as well as Thiendorf, Dresden and Aschheim in Germany, Legnano in Italy, Yokohama in Japan, Gyeonggi-do in South Korea, Singapore and Zhubei in Taiwan.

The two halves of the business still carry their origins. The probe cards descend from the MicroSpring work that began in 1993; the Beaverton operation descends from a microwave probe that Tektronix licensed to two of its engineers in the early 1980s, near Tektronix’s headquarters, as English Wikipedia describes.

For a design guide, FormFactor shows how a company built on one technical idea can absorb older engineering names such as Cascade Microtech and MicroProbe under one mark. Compare Tektronix, where Cascade Microtech’s founders worked, and Advantest, whose probe card assets FormFactor acquired in 2020. For this guide we use graphite, a cool silver and a copper accent with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep FormFactor’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.