Opto-electronic solution for PIC testing on wafer level

With the opto-electronic UFO Probe® Card, Jenoptik offers wafer manufacturers and wafer test equipment suppliers a timesaving and yield-increasing solution for the synchronized testing of electronic and photonic components.

Jenoptik’s Probe Card enables the simultaneous testing of electrical and photonic functionalities at wafer level – especially at high throughput rates in high-volume production. The innovative optical test concept of the UFO Probe® eliminates the need for active alignment. Each UFO Probe® Card is customized to the individual requirements and the respective wafer layout and is available with both cantilever and vertical needle technology. It covers the wavelength range from 1260 to 1625 nanometers used in the telecommunications and data communications sector, including polarization maintaining for individual or all optical channels.

By incorporating the vertical needle technology, Jenoptik has responded to the increased market requirements, particularly regarding co-packaged optics and ensures the economical use of the UFO Probe® in high-volume test scenarios and ATE operability.

Just as light steers the world on a large scale, it can also steer the world on a small scale. Chips with photonic functions mark the next step in the semiconductor industry. They are needed to process the growing volumes of data that flow through networks in the form of light in fiber optic cables.

Demand for the powerful circuits is growing rapidly, which is why manufacturers are increasingly turning to photonic technologies. The production of these new types of components also requires a quality assurance system designed for this purpose. This should be suitable for high throughput rates and allow reliable and rapid statements to be made about the functionality of each individual chip. Jenoptik offers the first commercially viable solution for this with its UFO Probe® Card. The probe card does not only test the function of classic electrical but also optical components on chips.

These chips are photonic integrated circuits, or PICs, which are manufactured on wafers using a lithography process. As core components of transceivers, they translate electrical signals into optical signals and vice versa. Optical transceivers are used primarily in data centers and server farms, where data exchange is expanding particularly intensively. This also increases the importance of light, because it has the advantage over electricity of being able to transport larger amounts of data faster, more efficiently and without interference.