News: Suppliers
23 September 2026
VLC Photonics completes transfer of PIC testing and assembly operations to new facility
Fabless photonic integrated circuit (PIC) design, prototyping, testing and packaging house VLC Photonics S.L. of Valencia, Spain (a Hitachi Group company that has experience with material platforms including silicon photonics, indium phosphide, silicon nitride, PLC and polymer) has completed the transfer of its PIC testing & assembly operations to its new headquarters at the Táctica Industrial Park in Paterna, Valencia. The move concludes a phased relocation that began with the transfer of its non-technical teams to the new offices in November 2025.
The new facility spans 1545m2 (16,600ft2), consisting of 315m2 of cleanroom space, 480m2 of laboratories, and 750m2 of offices. The cleanroom is certified to ISO Class 7 (Class 10,000) with full ESD protection, and the R&D characterization is performed in an adjacent ISO Class 8 laboratory. All testing, assembly and metrology equipment and instrumentation are now installed and operating at the new site.
Purpose-built infrastructure for PIC test and assembly
The relocated infrastructure supports the full range of characterization and test services that VLC Photonics offers to PIC developing companies, photonic foundries, system integrators, and research organizations:
- Wafer-level testing with fully automated probe alignment at nanometer precision, both for vertical and edge coupling through trenches, covering optical, electrical DC, and RF parameters.
- Die-level testing on both semi-automated and fully automated platforms, supporting edge and vertical grating coupling, with automated chip and fiber pick, place and attachment, and throughput exceeding 1000 dies per month.
- Packaged PIC testing for chip-on-board and chip-on-carrier assemblies.
- Electrical characterization up to 110GHz, with NRZ and PAM4 signal generation and real-time analysis at 256GSa/s for eye diagram and bit-error-rate evaluation.
- Optical characterization from 350nm to 4000nm, spanning visible, near-infrared, and mid-infrared wavelengths, including full polarization control.
- Assembly capabilities for test boards, including semi-automatic wire bonding, flip-chip attachment, fiber array attachment, and high-precision 2D/3D optical metrology.
- Reliability testing, including thermal test in a humidity-controlled climatic chamber for high-temperature operating life (HTOL), high-temperature storage (HTS), temperature cycling (TC), thermal shock (TS), damp heat/85°C-85%RH (THB), highly accelerated stress testing (HAST/uHAST).
VLC Photonics says that operating a dedicated, company-controlled environment allows it to schedule test campaigns independently, maintain full control over the confidentiality of customer samples and data within a single secured chain of custody, and allocate capacity from R&D toward low- and mid-volume test and assembly work as customer demand grows, with the possibility to transfer the processes to larger-volume partners in collaboration with Hitachi. The facility retains a built-in cleanroom expansion zone to accommodate further capacity without structural modification.
“Moving our labs is not something a test house does lightly, especially after having grown over 15 years on our previous location,” says CEO Iñigo Artundo. “Completing the transfer with every system back in operation in record time is a credit to our engineering team. What matters to our customers is what it means: we now control our own environment end-to-end, which means we set the schedule, we protect the samples, and we can scale capacity as the market demands,” he adds. “Photonic integration is moving from prototype volumes toward real production volumes, and this facility is how we help our customers reach there faster and more reliable, in a cost-effective way.”
Founded in 2011 as a spin-off of the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), VLC Photonics still maintains, after the move, an active presence on the university high-tech campus for R&D collaborations, and with the local PIXEurope photonics pilot line.
VLC Photonics is exhibiting in booth #2058 at the European Conference on Optical Communications (ECOC 2026) in Málaga, Spain (21–23 September).
VLC Photonics receives new wafer-level test system from ficonTEC
