Breaking the mold of photonic packaging

The packaging of photonic devices remains a hindering challenge to the deployment of integrated photonic modules. This is never as true as for silicon photonic modules where the cost efficiency and scalability of chip fabrication in microelectronic production facilities is far ahead of current photonic packaging technology. More often than not, photonic modules are still packaged today with legacy manual processes and high-precision active alignment. Automation of these manual processes can provide gains in yield and scalability. Thus, specialized automated equipment has been developed for photonic packaging, is now commercially available, and is providing an incremental improvement in cost and scalability. However, to bring the cost and scalability of photonic packaging on par with silicon chip fabrication, we feel a more disruptive approach is required. Hence, in recent years, we have developed photonic packaging in standard, highthroughput microelectronic packaging facilities. This approach relies on the concepts already responsible for the attractiveness of silicon photonic chip fabrication: (1) moving complexity from die-level packaging processes to waferlevel planar fabrication, and (2) leveraging the scale of existing microelectronic facilities for photonic fabrication. We have demonstrated such direction with peak coupling performance of 1.3 dB from standard cleaved fiber to chip and 1.1 dB from chip to chip.