PIC Testing is crucial when bringing PIC ideas to life. It is essential to validate both the fabrication process and its tolerances through deep analysis, ensuring the intended functionality of your final layout. Additionally, understanding the actual fabrication yield is vital for accelerating the ramp-up phase and accurately estimating and controlling the final product cost.
Cost and Time
Investing in a comprehensive and well-planned PIC testing campaign for your devices is absolutely essential for ensuring success. Such a campaign allows for early identification and resolution of design and fabrication issues, which can save significant time and money in the long run. Addressing these problems early on helps avoid costly delays and redesigns, leading to a more efficient development process.
Therefore, having the necessary experience and state-of-the-art instrumentation is critical. Many of our clients initially underestimate the complexity and cost associated with PIC testing in-house. It requires substantial investment in sophisticated equipment, specialized knowledge, and ongoing maintenance. At VLC Photonics, our PIC testing equipment alone is worth over €5M, reflecting the high level of precision and capability needed to perform accurate and reliable testing.
By partnering with an experienced PIC testing house, you can leverage our advanced resources and expertise to ensure your devices meet the highest standards of quality and performance. This investment in thorough and professional testing is a key factor in the successful development and commercialization of your photonic integrated circuits.
Experience and Efficiency
Often founded by academics, startups may rely on standard PIC testing setups that are suitable for proof of concept but insufficient for product development. For this, you need standardized operating procedures (SOPs), ISO-verified quality, regular maintenance and calibration of the equipment and instruments, a cleanroom environment with adequate ESD environment, consumable stocking, skilled personnel, top-level quality equipment, and much more.
Once you have a verified and working product, moving to volume production requires automated testing on a wafer scale. At VLC Photonics, we have two fully automated wafer-level testers to assist our customers in ramping up production. The increased volume of PIC testing generates more data, and analysis of this data can be overwhelming without proper expertise.
Let’s take a closer look: Imagine that you have 6 wafers with over 300 dies per wafer and over 10 structures per die and 2 measurement per structure. This will mean that we will conduct more than 36.000 measurements in total. If we say that the average probing time would be 4 seconds and the measurement time is 1 second, the total testing time would be around 1.5 days. Additionally, if you want to test multiple parameters, the measurement time per structure scales linearly. So, what would it take for you to test 6 wafers in-house?
Contracting a PIC testing house is key to speeding up the development cycle of a PIC product, reducing costs and overheads. An experienced team with the right equipment can efficiently resolve design and fabrication issues to save time and money ultimately. Remember, in this ecosystem, timing the market is crucial for a company’s success.
Enhance your PIC Developments with our expertise
If you believe that collaborating with our team could enhance your PIC developments, we offer a range of specialized services to support your needs:
- –Consultancy,
- –Design,
- –Manufacturing,
- –Testing,
- –Assembly,
- –Packaging.
Our experienced team is dedicated to providing tailored solutions that drive innovation and efficiency in your projects. By leveraging our state-of-the-art equipment and extensive industry knowledge, we ensure the highest quality and performance for your photonic integrated circuits.
For more information about how our services can benefit your PIC developments, please reach out to us at sales@vlcphotonics.com
To learn more about our specific offerings in PIC testing, including automated wafer-level and die-level testing, visit this page. Here, you’ll find detailed information about our cutting-edge testing capabilities.
Partner with us to take your PIC projects to the next level!
