Asmpt Amicra and Teramount partner to fight challenges in silicon photonics packaging

26 Sep 2023 --- Asmpt Amicra and Teramount are teaming up to connect fibers to silicon photonic chips and packaging to meet growing bandwidth demands in datacom and telecom applications. With AI and high-performance networking rapidly developing, the companies highlight that one of the main challenges has been to achieve seamless fiber-to-chip connectivity.

The collaboration between the two companies is based on the placement of Teramount’s wafer-level self-aligning optical elements on customers’ silicon photonics wafers. It uses Asmpt Amicra’s advanced precision die attach machineries, enabling a solution to this challenge. 

“There is a clear demand from customers for high-volume silicon photonics manufacturing and packaging,” says Hesham Taha, Teramount’s president and CEO. 

An integrated circuit is a chip containing electronic components that form a functional circuit, such as those embedded inside smartphones, computers and other electronic devices. A photonic integrated circuit is a chip that contains photonic components, which are components that work with light (photons). In a photonic chip, photons pass through optical components such as waveguides (equivalent to a resistor or electrical wire), lasers (equivalent to transistors), polarizers and phase shifters.

The companies connect fibers to silicon photonic chips and packaging to meet growing bandwidth demands.Tech scale up 
Silicon photonics is a material platform from which photonic integrated circuits can be made. It uses silicon on insulator wafers as the semiconductor substrate material, and most of the standard complementary metal-oxide semiconductor manufacturing processes can be applied.

“They are keen to see this supported by equipment already used in high-volume outsourced semiconductor assembly and test environments. Asmpt Amicra, a die-to-wafer attach equipment company, is an ideal partner for Teramount to scale up and meet this rising customer demand.”

Asmpt Amicra is a global supplier of ultra-high precision die attach equipment specializing in ultra-high precision die attach solutions and Teramount is a “leader” in scalable fiber connectivity to chips. 

“Silicon photonics is the key technology of our future everyday life. The fast transfer of constantly growing amounts of data requires ever-increasing accuracy when assembling the semiconductor components,” underlines Dr. Johann Weinhaendler, managing director of Asmpt Amicra. 

“In Teramount, we see an optimal expert in the development of high-speed connectivity solutions where we meet each other to incorporate their products via high-precision passive wafer-level assembly of optical lens components.”

Edited by Natalie Schwertheim