PIC and Silicon Photonics Testing

Photonic integrated circuits (PICs) are a key enabler driving advances in communications, optical computing, aerospace, defense and medical applications. However, PICs introduce unique measurement challenges, and testing remains a large contribution to the overall cost of bringing products to market. Effective testing of modern PICs requires more comprehensive and sophisticated methodologies to ensure optimal performance and reduced development costs. 

Luna’s wide range of test and measurement solutions provide customers with fast, accurate, high-resolution measurement instruments to quantitatively assess the optical performance of each component on the chip, whether early in the prototyping stage or in production.

Luna has the technology to look inside PICs in the transmission mode or reflection mode with micrometer-level spatial resolution for a complete optical characterization of the device.

Typical measurements include:

• Insertion loss (IL)
• Return loss (RL)
• Polarization-dependent loss (PDL) vs. wavelength
• Reflectivity/transmission loss vs. distance
• Reflectivity/transmission loss vs. wavelength
• Phase response
• Group delay (GD)
• Chromatic dispersion (CD) vs. wavelength
• Polarization mode dispersion (PMD) vs. wavelength
• Second-order PMD vs. wavelength
• Min/Max Loss due to Polarization
• Impulse response
• Jones matrix and Mueller matrix elements
• Phase Ripple – Linear and Quadratic
• Polarization Performance vs. Distance
• Polarization Crosstalk vs. Distance
• Degree of Polarization (DOP), State of Polarization (SOP) and  Polarization Extinction Ratio (PER)