News: Optoelectronics
12 February 2020
Keysight, NOEIC and CompoundTek establish open standards for layout, design and automation of PIC testing
Keysight Technologies Inc of Santa Rosa, CA, USA, the National Information Optoelectronics Innovation Center (NOIEC) in Wuhan China Optics Valley and Singapore-based silicon photonic (SiPh) foundry services provider CompoundTek Pte Ltd are to work together to establish layout design standards for the automated testing of photonic integrated circuits (PICs).
PICs offer advantages over their discrete components and bulk optics counterparts including significant footprint reduction, improved stability and lower energy consumption. Ubiquitous in telecom networks solutions, PICs are attracting increasing attention in new applications like sensing, bio-medical, cryptography and quantum computing. As the range of applications widens, a high level of standardization and automation becomes essential to ensure the scalability, process monitoring and yield required for volume production.
Keysight, NOEIC and CompoundTek are collaborating to establish a globally recognized standardized approach to PIC layout, enabling access to automated testing, generic assembly and packaging services for scaling to volume production. The goal is to interface with PIC designers who define the test protocols during the design stage and with the test facilities that will enable automation and define measurement procedures and their parameters.
The consortium will work together to standardize PIC layout conventions and design rules for edge-coupled circuits, which include, but are not limited to, die orientation, location of I/O ports, placement of DC pads, fiducials and indication of restricted areas important for automated testing, assembly and packaging. Adopting and deploying a proven integrated solution, featuring Keysight’s Photonic Suite on a fully automated probe station with speed optimized test executive algorithm, facilitates high-throughput testing. It also enables design-for-test (DFT) and first-design-right (FDR) techniques to reduce overall costs associated with the test. Keysight’s Photonic Suite consists of the firm’s PathWave and Photonic Application solutions.
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