Leveraging Opportunity: Test and Assembly as Fulcrum for Scaling

The good news is that new applications of photonics are sprouting like desert flowers after a rain. Whether the challenge is to accommodate new applications for billions of ever-higher-quality cameras, or to package and deploy next-generation AI chips with photonic connections to high bandwidth RAM, or to simply keep up with humanity’s insatiable appetite for connectivity, the trends are turning relentlessly vertical. The challenge is that the numbers add up to a thousand-fold step-function in industry productivity. And yield and losses must be addressed, painfully costly processes must be attacked, and that three-order-of-magnitude increase in productivity must be scaled, all at the same time. What new approaches, tools and technologies have emerged to enable the necessary pace? In this talk we identify some commonality among the challenges presented by the diverse applications and technologies the photonics world is pursuing. It turns out there are not just processes, tools and substrates to borrow from semiconductor manufacturing, but lessons as well. When dovetailed with novel technologies that address stubborn pain-points common to the manufacturing and testing of photonic devices of all sorts, the insights are truly enabling for an industry that finds itself on the launching pad without a flight plan. We close with some success stories from the emerging ecosystem and a look at the hopeful future we can now anticipate.