A Cost-Effective Solution for Characterizing Photonic Integrated Circuits

Silicon photonics has become an important technology for several applications including high-speed optical communication and optical interconnect, optical sensing, LIDAR, quantum photonics, neural networks, and optical computing and processing. In spite of the maturity of silicon photonics, testing is still troublesome principally because of the difficulty of coupling light into the chips. Although commercial test stations are available, these are pretty expensive for small institutions and companies. We designed and implemented a die-level, semi-automatic, test station. Our solution is capable of testing passive and active photonic components and can be used with the two most common coupling methods, namely, grating couplers and edge couplers.