Silicon photonics has been “coming” for a long time. Now, according to Advantest , it’s about volume. “On the foundry side, the big ones are TSMC, Tower, GlobalFoundries, STMicroelectronics and Samsung,” said Dr. Clemens Leichtle, who leads Advantest’s V93000 photonics business. “Basically five companies which have 300 mm lines for silicon photonics.” Dr. Clemens Leichtle, Advantest Testing those devices is complicated because requirements change at every insertion. On a photonic IC wafer, electrical contacts and optical I/O sit on the same side, so it can be probed from one side. Once an electronic IC is stacked on top, the optical signals may only be reachable from the bottom of the wafer. That calls for new probers with chucks that have cutouts so a fiber can reach underneath. Final test of a packaged device brings its own challenge: automatically pushing a fiber with a detachable connector into the device socket. A production test cell About two years ago, Advantest partnered with FormFactor, whose optical probers are well established in engineering labs. FormFactor added optical and fiber alignment to a TEL production prober, “the workhorse in our industry,” as Leichtle put it, to create TRITON, and Advantest integrated its V93000 tester. “From our perspective, it’s the very first electro-optical test cell built for production,” Leichtle said. Systems are installed at foundries, and volume production has started. Aligning the fiber is a six-degree-of-freedom problem (X, Y, distance, height plus three rotational angles), done across an air gap without touching the device. Advantest’s SmarTest software controls the full cell, including a newly released optical test rack integrating lasers, polarization controllers, attenuators, power meters and optical spectrum analyzers from selected vendors, managed through an optical control library. Calibration is one of the hardest parts. Losses in the optical path vary with wavelength and polarization, and Advantest has developed a calibration method, for which it has applied for a patent, to ensure equal power at the tip of every fiber. Today’s devices have around 40 fibers. The next generation will likely double that, and Leichtle expects devices with more than 100 fibers soon. Add parallel testing of two or four devices and the instrument count balloons. “Instruments in the rack typically do not scale nicely with the number of resources,” he said, and Advantest is committed to a scalable solution. Busy building Michael Kwok, business development manager for silicon photonics, said the racks are now built turnkey in San Jose by a dedicated team: instruments installed and calibrated, seismic base included for shipment to Taiwan, and TÜV certified for safety and EMI. The racks support Class 3B lasers, and opening a prober door trips a safety interlock that shuts the laser down. “Customers don’t want to be in the business of building racks. They want to build the chips,” he said. Demand, he said, is the reason there was no rack on the show floor. “We’re so busy shipping them, we couldn’t keep up with demand,” Kwok said. “I like to say that we’re busy building versus boasting.” Editor’s note: In the interest of efficiency and timeliness, this article was drafted with the help of AI (Claude, from Anthropic), working from a recording of an interview arranged by Bodewell Group and the company’s press materials. It was reviewed and edited by Semiconductor Digest. The post Advantest Readies Silicon Photonics Test for Volume Production appeared first on Semiconductor Digest .