In the past few months, Fraunhofer HHI has made significant improvements to their Multi-Project Wafer service. A 50% reduction of chip lead time was achieved and the DFB laser, a crucial building block, has improved considerably in performance. In addition, the RFconnect packaging service was expanded to now support additional cell sizes and angled spot-size converters.
Short lead time
Time-to-market states a crucial criterion for companies and RTOs to be competitive and cost-efficient. Often prototype development is accompanied by design iterations in order to meet the target performance. Especially photonic integrated circuits demand for thorough planning as design corrections cannot be applied during the process. The entire fabrication process involves tape-in, processing in fab, backend, and wafer validation. Long fabrication does not only affect the current wafer run but also has an impact on upcoming wafer runs. Fraunhofer HHI’s stable fabrication process now enables fast prototyping with lead times of less than five months for multi-project as well as for dedicated wafer runs.
Improved Performance
In addition to the significant lead time reduction, Fraunhofer HHI photonic InP foundry service customers benefit from process optimization leading to lower optical losses, higher optical output power and increased speed. Improvement of crucial building blocks like, e.g., DFB lasers as shown below allow customers to design high-density PICs.
Expanded Packaging Service
Emerging fields in photonic integration like biosensing, all-optical processors for AI and quantum communication demand for complex photonic integrated circuits (PICs). Characterization of a bare PIC quickly becomes difficult, costly and time consuming. Fraunhofer HHI`s already established RFconnect offers a standardized, reproducible and scalable solution to enable fast and convenient prototype development. To give customers more design flexibility, HHI proudly announces the expansion of RFconnect by supporting additional cell sizes and angled spot-size converters. Customers can now select packaging of 2×8 mm², 4×8 mm², and 6×8 mm² large PICs. In combination with the packaging service expansion, Fraunhofer HHI adds an increased MPW cell size, 6×8 mm², to the standard offer with design templates based on GDS provided.
Want to benefit from Fraunhofer HHI’s improved MPW service? Click here to apply directly for an MPW run, or consult the MPW schedule here.
Interested in the expanded packaging service? Read more about RFconnect here.