Richard Dai, Ph.D. Candidate, Columbia University
Liang Yuan Dai received his B.S. in electrical engineering from the New Jersey Institute of Technology in 2016. He completed internships at Gentex Corporation and Purdue University before joining the Lightwave Research Laboratory. Currently, he is pursuing his Ph.D at Columbia University, with a focus on silicon photonic chip design and testing for data communications.
Optimized Test Sequence Methodology for Minimal Test Time and Maximal Throughput
As silicon photonics moves out of research and development, and into mass production, there is a need to streamline the testing process in order to reduce overall manufacturing costs. Currently, when equipment, facilities, and staff costs are factored into account, the price of testing is revealed to be on par with the price of the photonic chip itself. While the tests to be run on optical chips are similar to the ones used to evaluate electronic ICs, the procedures to perform these tests are different, as one needs to account for interactions on the optical domain. These considerations greatly increase test time, and thus production cost, which makes the need for test optimization much more significant. To address this, we have developed an algorithm which can optimally minimize the total duration for a sequence of tests, given the average runtime and historical yield of each test. In doing so, we have shown an average of 40% decrease in total test time, when comparing our algorithm to other methods of test time reduction.