Title: The emergence of intelligent positioning in high-throughput photonics manufacturing automation

Biography:

Scott Jordan is the Head of Photonics for PI and a PI Fellow. He is a Physicist, with an MBA in Finance/New Ventures. He has multiple contributions to positioning and optimization technologies.

Abstract

In Silicon Photonics and other precision optical fields, production quantities have exponentiated and competition has intensified rapidly over the past few years. In multiple test and packaging steps, commencing with probing wafer-based devices (which can include optical elements) while still on the wafer and proceeding through final packaging and all the intermediate steps in between, submicron-scale alignments are necessary and dominate overall production costs. Examples: In Silicon Photonics, the orientation of components to sub-micron/millidegree or even nanoscale accuracies is needed throughout the multiple test and assembly steps. In smartphone camera manufacturing, more elements are assembled to tighter tolerances with each successive generation, to the tune of several billion cameras of increasing sophistication each year. Laser manufacturing is similarly complicated and time-consuming, with resonator elements that can include mirrors, diffraction gratings and gain media all requiring optimization of their mutual orientation to maximize power and modal quality. Now optical cables are entering the consumer space, propelled by faster implementations of USB, Thunderbolt and HDMI. These also require exacting positional optimization across channels, in multiple degrees of freedom, and on both sides of the cable. Previously this demanded exceptional dimensional control and fixturing, or painstaking and time-consuming positioning via a dedicated computer. But a new branch of intelligent control now provides fast, automatic, nanoscale-accurate orientation optimization for test and assembly. This improves process economics and yield by eliminating time-consuming steps, decoupling alignment from position metrology, and allowing fast optimizations of all inputs and outputs in as few as one step. The key is leveraging device optimization physics to reduce dependence on position commandability. A universal implementation is now commercially available and fab-proven. Process cost reductions of 99% are seen.