Our processes

Our machines can be outfitted with blades for dicing silicon, glass or ceramic wafers and panels. Application-specific blades for optical facets (suitable for known good die selection) are also available.

After dicing, the facets of PICs are often not smooth enough for low-loss coupling to other optical components. Our die polishing facilities ensure that the surface roughness of your chips is suitable for packaging. We use our single chip polishing machine for prototype projects and have a multi-chip machine for volume manufacturing.

We have facilities for both manual and automated die bonding or flip chip assembly. The applications of this process include securing bare dies to a submount, vertically integrating PICs of different materials, and assembling components such as VCSELs, TIAs, ASICs, or photodiodes to the PIC. Our bonding methods include thermocompression bonding, soldering and adhesive bonding.

We can edge-couple or vertically couple components of different material platforms with sub-micron precision using active alignment. Our automated process is perfect for scaling up your chiplet manufacturing.

We can attach single fibers or fiber arrays to your PIC in an edge-coupling or (quasi-planar) grating coupling configuration, using active or passive alignment. Our in-house assembly tools can achieve placement errors below 250 nm, resulting in a low-loss connection.

In a partnership with Nanoscribe we can 3D print microlenses onto fiber arrays or PIC gratings with high precision. The lens arrays can focus or collimate the light, enabling mode field conversions or large distance free space coupling.

Using our automated wire bonding tool, we provide electrical connectivity (for DC and RF signals) for your PIC. We use 17 μm gold bond wire to perform wedge-wedge bonding. At a minimum bond pad size of 80×80 μm, we can achieve a pitch of as little as 100 μm.

Glob top dispensing is a process that deposits an epoxy or resin across wire bonds to provide mechanical support. We can provide glob tops suitable for automotive, medical and space applications.

We can hermetically seal your modules using various methods. Depending the depth of the vacuum required, we can perform adhesive bonding or laser welding. We also support polarization maintaining fiber arrays with hermetic feedthroughs.

We design our own DC and RF (frequencies up to 200 GHz) printed circuit boards (PCBs) that become part of your optoelectronic modules. We can also offer this service to you separately.

As part of our daily photonics packaging work, our highly qualified and multi-disciplinary team of engineers perform 3D mechanical design and run thermal simulations. We can also offer these services to you separately.

Using optical backscatter reflectometry (OBR) we can identify losses along the light path of your module. Not only can we measure the magnitude of any reflections or attenuations, but we can also pinpoint exactly where they occur.

Our pull-shear testing equipment helps us optimize our wire bonding processes by locating and analyzing weaknesses in the bonds. We can also test the shear strength of the connections of small components like VCSELs and NTC thermistors.