Fabless design house VLC Photonics of Valencia, Spain - which provides optical integration solutions and services including photonic integrated circuit (PIC) design or in-house chip characterization and test, together with fabless manufacturing and packaging services – is now offering access to multi-project wafer (MPW) shuttle runs on different generic manufacturing platforms including indium phosphide (InP), silicon-on-insulator (SOI), photonic lightwave circuit (PLC), and LioniX’s TriPleX technology.
Currently, MPW manufacturers offer a set of fabrication cells with different areas and prices. VLC is hence introducing what is says is a new concept in custom PIC design - ‘MPW Standard Design’ - where its service costs for each manufacturer and cell size are fixed.
“After severals years in the market, by serving customers and performing our own R&D using all the MPW manufacturers around the globe, we are ready to offer a frozen price, independent of the chip functionality,” explains VLC’s founder Pascual Muoz. “This is the equivalent to generic manufacturing, where costs are fixed by chip area indepedently of its content and end functionality, but at a design level,” he adds.
“The wide range of integration technologies and fabrication platforms makes selecting the best manufacturing approach for each application and device quite difficult for our customers,” states CEO Iigo Artundo. “We learned our customers value an easy and straight-forward solution that allows them to directly choose the most suited way to prototype their PICs,” he adds. Any company with some basic experience of photonic integration will be able to navigate all the MPW design and manufacturing options currently offered by VLC, asserts Artundo. “Customers will also be able to get approximate costs and manufacturing times to configure their own projects immediately,” he continues. “Furthermore, they will directly interface our engineers one click after, to clear out any hurdles they may find when facing any integration project”.
