MRSI Systems – IEEE Tech Insider Webinar: The Challenges in High Volume Manufacturing of Photonic Devices for Data Center Applications
Internet traffic has been growing at an exponential level, continuously driven by video streaming, 3D imaging, IoT, VR/AR, and other emerging data applications. The data generated by internet traffic is enormous and data centers are crucial to support data communications, storage and processing through cloud computing. Photonic devices such as optical transceivers play vital roles in modern data centers. Demand for photonic devices is at an unprecedented level. And the technology upgrades to support this demand are expected to happen at the same time as this volume ramps, e.g. 40G to 100G and to 200G/400G and beyond.
These requirements have posed significant challenges to photonic device manufacturing. To support data center build-up, the photonic device companies need to maintain an “elastic capacity model” to respond fast to data center customer’s demands, and at the same time to maintain low manufacturing costs to produce profits. This calls for much higher levels of manufacturing automation than the photonic industry has ever experienced. In addition, the co-existence of many product standards requires that manufacturing automation is flexible to allow multiple products, e.g., single die Fabry-Perot (FP) laser submount and multiple die electro-absorption laser (EML) submount assembly, to go through the same production lines without sacrificing throughput. Furthermore, more and more advanced technologies demand higher and higher precision in assembly automations, again without sacrificing speed and throughput. High speed, high precision, and high flexibility for the high volume manufacturing of photonic devices require closer collaboration than ever between device designers, process developers, manufacturing engineers, and automation equipment suppliers. This webinar will discuss these trends, challenges, and opportunities.
Speaker: Dr. Yi Qian, Vice President of Product Management, MRSI Systems
