Technoprobe founder Giuseppe Crippa.Laila Pozzo/Technoprobe At age 60, Giuseppe Crippa accepted a buyout package and started making devices to test microchips. In February his company Technoprobe, whose clients include Apple and Samsung, finally went public. Giuseppe Crippa was offered a severance package from French-Italian semiconductor manufacturer STMicroelectronics (STM) in 1995. Crippa took it, ending a 35-year career at the firm. But rather than settle into a life of leisurely retirement, Crippa, then 60, jumped at the opportunity to start his own company. Expanding on an idea he’d been tinkering with for half a dozen years, Crippa started Technoprobe in a small town outside of Milan to make probe cards—miniature, needle-studded discs that attach to microchips to test them out—and for the first 15 years sold them largely to his former employer. “He was very inventive,” says Stefano Felici, Technoprobe’s CEO and Crippa’s nephew, in an early March Zoom interview from the firm’s headquarters in northern Italy. “To repair a probe card, you needed to send it to America and it would take two weeks. So he came up with a process to make them in his kitchen.” Twenty-seven years after its founding, Technoprobe is now one of the two biggest makers of probe cards in the world. The tech outfit supplies the probes to a blue-chip roster of tech giants including Apple, Qualcomm, Samsung and Nvidia as well as semiconductor makers AMD, Intel and TSMC. Because modern semiconductors are so complex, each chip requires its own probe card to check… Click below to read the full story from Forbes
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