NX5402A Silicon Photonics Wafer Test System Solution Set

Industry’s Only One-Stop Test Solution for Volume Production

As the production volume of Silicon Photonics devices increased, the production test becomes more crucial than ever in terms of quick yield ramp-up and effective test cost reduction.

NX5402A is the one-stop, fully automated, and volume production-ready Silicon Photonics wafer test solution with guaranteed system performance to meet stringent production test requirements on a fully automated wafer prober.

One-pass Silicon Photonics testing

Executing one-pass testing including both optical and electrical tests is essential for volume production where both throughput and flexibility matter. The NX5402A supports the Automatic One-Pass Testing and covers not only O/O and E/E testing but complex O/E and O/O with E testing.

Growing market, but challenging production testing

Silicon Photonics is a growing market and can be used for various applications such as data communications, optical computing, automotive, healthcare, etc. Testing silicon photonics devices is not simple and requires accurate optical measurements and precision mechanical control in addition to traditional electronic measurements. For volume production testing, a complex combination of measurement technologies, repeatability, reproducibility, and correlation must be maintained. To meet such stringent test requirements, it is natural that customers desire to have a turn-key test solution for quick ramp-up of Silicon Photonics volume production. However, due to the less availabilities of such solutions, they usually build their own production test system by purchasing required measurement instruments and equipment from multiple vendors. But achieving a production level of integration and automation is not that easy. Also, the total system maintenance and upgrade can be concerns due to requiring longer lead time, time-consuming vendor negotiations, and additional in-house workload or investments.

Why is a one-stop test solution required?

Customers who plan on Silicon Photonics wafer production need to overcome such challenges and focus more on data analysis for the yield ramp-up and the Silicon Photonics process improvements. As a result, a one-stop test solution enabling integrated and automated wafer testing with a dedicated support model is highly desired.

Solution from lab to fab

Keysight is the Original Equipment Manufacturer of proven optical and electrical instruments widely used for both R&D and various manufacturing customers. The NX5402A integrates such leading-edge measurement capabilities with the Keysight-developed Fiber Alignment and Positioning System and automates required testing based on newly developed PathWave Semiconductor Test software. As a result, users can enjoy the R&D-class measurement capabilities with the volume production-class measurement throughput and repeatability on users’ fully automated wafer prober.

Guaranteed performance by system calibration  and diagnostics

One of the important features of a volume production test system is system-level calibration. Unlike traditional electrical wafer testing, Silicon Photonics requires fiber probes for optical structure testing by accurately controlling z-height, laser beam angle, and fine lateral alignment. Verifying and calibrating these mechanical parameters is not easy and usually consume a lot of time for verification with unavoidable variations.

The NX5402A’s Advanced Wafer-Level Photonic Calibration enables such optical verification and calibration using a dedicated tool. The system performance can always be guaranteed at the wafer level including optical and mechanical features. In addition, every hardware component condition in the system can be monitored as you need by the Built-in Automatic System Diagnostics.

SPECS compatible

The PathWave Semiconductor Test software offers test plan development and execution capabilities compatible with Keysight SPECS software. The offline version is also available for more efficient  test development.