On-wafer testing of basic building blocks in Photonic Integrated Circuits (PICs)

Characterization of Photonic ICs is time consuming with very critical alignment tolerances for accurate measurement. To overcome these problems we are working on electrical testing of the optical properties of the most important Building Blocks (BBs) in Photonic ICs by integration of test sources and detectors. This approach allows fast, accurate and reproducible on-wafer measurements prior to cleaving and coating using only electrical contacts. Several structures are proposed for testing the performance of the Basic BBs.