Zero damage, full Traceability: What VLC Photonics’ Die Sorter means for your photonic chips
Photonic chips, unlike electronic ICs, often include fragile facets, surface-sensitive coatings, and non-standard die shapes or sizes. These properties make manual handling not only inefficient but also risk-prone. Damaged chips, yield losses, mislabeling, or contamination are costly setbacks and, it gets even worse if you also add the poor fabrication yields that the photonic foundries provide.
Also, as photonic integrated circuits (PICs) grow in complexity and market ready, the need for scalable, efficient, and reliable backend processing becomes mandatory.
Recognizing this need, VLC Photonics has recently integrated a pick and place tool, marking another step towards automating its backend capabilities.
Automating backend steps like die sorting and binning from wafers or gelpacks enables:
- Reduced handling
- Consistent quality through repeatable processes
- Organized output ready for testing, characterization, or packaging
- End-to-end traceability from wafer to packaged device
The newly acquired Die Sorter at VLC Photonics is designed not only to automatically do the pick and place, but also as a modular system. This allows VLC Photonics to adapt configurations to customer-specific die formats, including Gel-Paks, waffle packs, or film frames, ensuring flexibility for R&D and production. Some of the key characteristics of the die sorter are:
- Supports wafers up to 200 mm, with ring-frame mounting and stretch control
- Placement accuracy of ±120 µm for reliable die-on-submount processes
- Throughput up to 1200 units/hour, minimizing process time
- Customizable ejectors and pick-up tips for different die materials and sizes
- Visual inspection and tracking are integrated into the workflow for full QA traceability
A Real-World Success Story
In a recent SiPh MPW run from some customers, VLC used the die sorter to process 6 wafers with 2340 chips with different designs and end users. For that, we not only had to sort the chips from different customers but also track the different designs of the wafers and sort them into different gelpacks. This made the process really time-consuming if we consider not doing it with the automated die sorter. At the end, we could conclude that:
- Sorting time was reduced by 50%
- Zero chip damage
- Full traceability enabled faster downstream testing
- Customer satisfaction improved through on-time, defect-free delivery
As the photonics industry scales, backend automation will be as crucial as front-end innovation. VLC Photonics’ adoption of an automated Die Sorter is not just a tool upgrade, it’s a strategic move toward industry-grade backend facilities.
For clients, this means faster cycle times, higher reliability, and greater confidence in the transition from lab to scalable product.
