Patent 7235984 was granted and assigned to Tokyo Electron on June, 2007 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A probe device 20 having a contact load monitoring device 10. This contact load monitoring device measures the displacement of a loading table caused by a contact load exerted on the mounting table from a probe in an overdrive by means of a displacement sensor 11 disposed in the space below the mounting table as a sinkage quantity. This sinkage quantity is collated with a correlation table to determine the contact load. If the contact load is less than the designed contact load, the mounting table is further overdriven.