Assembly and Packaging of Photonic Integrated Circuits: A Modular Concept Towards a Fully Automated Process

Part one: Modular Machine Plat Form Enables Breakthrough In Photonics Assembly Speed
The cost of photonic components is dominated by assembly and packaging processes. This is a drag on adoption at a time when rapid global scaling of connectivity is required. To break this chicken and the egg problem a fast, accurate and cost effective solution for the assembly of photonic products must be found. TEGEMA has developed a configurable machine platform focusing on the assembly of photonic devices, which shows in its potential a roughly ten times higher throughput than with currently available solutions. The already proven systems from PI form the heart of our automated photonics assembly platform concepts where modules are added for further automation of the required assembly steps.

Part two: Inside the Solution: Intelligent Micro-Robotics for High Throughput Photonics Manufacturing Automation
Precise alignment of individual elements of photonic integrated circuits (PIC), like glass fibers or arrays, chips, VCSELs, lenses, diffractive elements or photodiodes, is required in multiple manufacturing and test steps during their production. Commencing with probing devices while they are still on the wafer, the alignments must be repeated through final packaging and multiple intermediate test and assembly steps in between. Thus alignment has heavily dominated production costs of PICs.
Intelligent micro-robotic technology now enables alignments of multiple elements in multiple degrees-of-freedom in as few as one quick step. The technology already dominates optical wafer probing and is fab-proven. We will discuss this technology and its applications.

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