Failure Analysis Techniques and Lab Requirements for Silicon Photonics Fault Isolation

Summary:

As industries expand their use of silicon photonic integrated circuits (PICs), it is imperative that manufacturers be able to continuously improve the quality of their manufactured PICs. To do so, fault isolation of unwanted defects is necessary. Electrical fault isolation tools are typically comprised of a photoemission camera, thermal camera, and a laser scanning microscopy system. These same isolation tools can be used to perform fault isolation on PICs. The photoemission camera captures short-wave infrared light, capable of capturing all three photonic light input wavelengths (O, C, and L-bands) and can be used to isolate any areas within a waveguide feature that the input/signal light is being emitted and lost. The thermal camera, with ability to capture mid-wave and long-wave infrared (MWIR/LWIR) emissions is useful in mapping dynamic and steady state temperatures of PICs integrated and co-packaged with electrical circuits. The presentation will discuss challenges of using state of the art 300nm electrical fault isolation tools for PICs including variations of electro-optical test setup, imaging challenges in 3D co-packaged samples, and the limitations of laser scanning microscopy.