The Critical Role of Inspection and Metrology in Silicon Photonics Manufacturing

3:25 pm - 3:50 pm

The rapid growth of artificial intelligence (AI) workloads is increasingly constrained not by transistor scaling, but by interconnect limitations across package, die, and system levels. Electrical interconnects are emerging as a primary bottleneck, restricting achievable data rates, increasing latency, and driving unsustainable power dissipation and thermal load. As a result, advanced packaging architectures are being fundamentally reshaped around interconnect innovation.

Approaches such as 2.5D and 3D integration, heterogeneous integration, chiplet architectures, and high-bandwidth memory (HBM) improve proximity between compute and memory, but further exacerbate interconnect density, signal integrity, and die/package heat challenges. Silicon photonics (SiPh) is rapidly gaining adoption as a scalable solution, enabling optical interconnects that deliver significantly higher bandwidth density, lower latency, and reduced energy per bit compared to traditional electrical I/O. Technologies such as co-packaged optics are emerging as critical enablers to overcome interconnect-driven system constraints in next-generation AI infrastructure. However, SiPh integration introduces process control challenges across key device structures, including waveguides, microlenses, laser and photo-diode fabrication, fiber connect v-grooves, and integrated heaters. Performance is highly sensitive to film thickness, refractive index, sidewall geometry, stress, and material uniformity. As a result, advanced films metrology and inspection play a central role in enabling manufacturability. Techniques such as spectroscopic ellipsometry, picosecond acoustics, and high-resolution inspection are essential for controlling critical dimensions, material properties, and defectivity across these structures.

This presentation highlights detailed examples of where inspection and metrology provide truly unique capabilities supporting optical device performance and integration in this high growth sector enabling process control, yield, and reliability for high-volume manufacturing of silicon photonics-based interconnect architectures.

Key Technologies Covered

Advanced AOI and integrated 3D metrology techniques using ML
Spectroscopic ellipsometry, OCD, film metrology, stress, refractive index
Optical critical dimension and profile metrology leveraging advanced ML algorithms
Film thickness, composition and materials characterization
Acoustic metal film/stack metrology

Featured Speakers

Mr. Timothy Kryman

Sr. Director, Product Marketing, Onto Innovation

Tim Kryman is Sr. Director of product marketing at Onto Innovation, specializing in films metrology. He has over 20 years of experience in the semiconductor equipment industry and has held a variety of customer‑focused account, product, and corporate marketing roles at Onto Innovation, and formerly Rudolph Technologies. Tim has extensive experience supporting Tier 1 logic and foundry customers, including a decade managing strategic accounts, and more recently, leading marketing initiatives for Onto’s 300mm films metrology portfolio. Prior to Onto Innovation, he served as a marketing manager in the corporate marketing services group at Ingersoll Rand. Tim holds a BS in accounting and information systems from Lock Haven University and a MBA from DeSales University.