Photonic Wafer-Scale Testing System

Tender description

A photonic wafer-scale testing system is required by Silicon Photonics Group at the University of Southampton (Highfield Campus) for research activities. As one of the leading research team, the Silicon Photonics group has made a significant contribution in the field of silicon photonics most notably in waveguides, optical modulators, grating couplers, optical filters and switches. Collaborations with a number of industrial and academic institutions have been established. Silicon photonics is an emerging technology for making devices for optical communication systems, high-speed computing or various sensing applications. Complicated photonic circuits can be made on Silicon-on-Insulator (SOI) wafers based on a similar fabrication technology as used for CMOS industry. Similar to the CMOS industry, wafer-scale testing is going to be a critical step for quality control and failure diagnoses for silicon photonics. Grating couplers will be used as optical input/output (I/O) on photonic circuits to couple light into/out from single-mode optical fibres. Grating coupler is a device made of periodically etched lines to diffract light upwards to the optical fibres. Most grating couplers are about 10μm by 10μm in size, which may vary depending on specific designs. The accuracy for positioning the single-mode fibres for testing is required to be better than 1μm. We also developed a new type of erasable grating couplers, which can be used as optical I/O for testing and then erased with high power laser afterwards. Therefore, a tailor-made high power laser source used particularly for erasing the gratings would be required. The testing system is targeted to work with 8 inch wafers. Both passive and active photonic devices would be fabricated on the wafer. Apart from all those optical I/O mentioned above, high-speed electrical I/O would also be required. It may carry signals up to 50 Gb/s. Full details in relation to the requirement can be found in the Specification (File 4).