6-Axis Active Photonics Alignment Systems Explained

Introduction to fast 6DOF active alignment of silicon photonics components, arrays, and wafer level probing. PI at Photonics West. Solutions include advanced alignment algorithms, parallel kinematic alignment mechanisms, SiP wafer probers.

More information on active alignment of photonics components click here  .

Transcript

00:00:00 the new era of silicon photonics is being driven by us we walk around with supercomputers in our pockets we consume streaming media we participate in social networks we benefit from personalized medicine the internet of things all of these trends consume an

00:00:18 escalating amount of data every year and for reasons of capacity and energy efficiency the trend has been away from copper interconnects to optical interconnects energy efficiency capacity scalability distributed architectures for data centers all of these are

00:00:38 are facilitated by photonic designs in addition we have future plans for new types of computing that will definitely involve photonics so photonic interconnects are increasingly important for all of us and they need to be manufactured that starts at the wafer level this is a wafer prober made by cascade microtech

00:01:03 a division of form factor and it shows how the micro robots that are manufactured by my company pi are used in an embedded application to validate the health of chips prior to the packaging process the real costs in making a silicon photonics device is actually in the in the packaging so

00:01:26 you do not want to package a bad device so the devices are validated and tested at the wafer level using one of these tools after the chips have been validated on a wafer probe and diced off of the wafer into individual chips they must be packaged one of the most important steps for that is to attach fibers or fiber arrays to

00:01:50 the chip itself our technology is unique in that it can perform input and output alignments and do so in multiple degrees of freedom all at the same time in a single step as opposed to the sequence of steps that used to be required it's much faster it's faster by about a factor of 100 not a small amount so here in this

00:02:14 application you can see the a repeating demonstration where we bring our input and output fiber arrays to a simulated chip that we have manufactured out of two glass arrays connected together because we can't show our customers devices being aligned here but here we bring the alignment or the input

00:02:35 and output arrays into a rough initial position and then we perform the fine alignment to maximize the photonic efficiency of the device of the couplings and then usually our customers will perform some bonding uh other operations the key here is the parallel execution of all of the

00:02:56 alignments it's unique in all the world we can do the multiple degrees of freedom the multiple inputs and outputs all in one step so it's significantly faster the field is also enjoying a continuing unfolding of new technologies and new devices new approaches that are very exciting because they

00:03:19 they promise continuing growth and continuing innovation in the industry this is a really good example here this is a high density interconnect that is pioneered by a company called cairo photonics in new jersey in this very very slender probe there are up to 91 individual single mode channels

00:03:43 that can be used to connect to a very high density photonic chip so actually what we're showing here is the ability to align and automatically track the coupling between these high density chips and the novel high density probe for more information about these positioning technologies and their importance for

00:04:08 research development and manufacturing of silicon silicon photonics devices quantum computing devices and anything of this sort your best first place for information is to contact your local pi applications engineer and sales specialist we have offices all over the world

00:04:26 and we're deeply embedded in these applications from the research to the manufacturing arenas