PICAlign™ Multichannel Active Alignment Architecture
- Revolutionary active alignment solution designed to overcome manufacturing challenges of high-volume Co-Packaged Optics (CPO) production
- Performs precise, rapid active alignments of multichannel arrays by integrating high-speed motion control, synchronized data acquisition & sophisticated alignment algorithms
- Alignment to within ~0.2 dB of global optimum in < 1 second
- Simultaneous multichannel monitoring across all device channels, not just outer loopback
- Custom Objective Function enables defining alignment conditions & power thresholds, optimizing alignment for the most critical channels (i.e. polarization-maintaining fibers)
- Reliability exceeding 30,000 hours MTBF for continuous production
- Developed in partnership with Santec & SENKO Advanced Components; patents pending
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Modern photonic devices are extremely sensitive to positional and angular misalignment. Movements of only a few microns or fractions of a degree can introduce significant insertion loss, reducing signal quality and device yield. Traditional active alignment methods were designed for single-channel devices and struggle to scale as channel counts increase. PICAlign addresses these challenges by measuring power levels across all channels simultaneously, enabling rapid, multichannel optimization in a multidimensional search space.
PICAlign (patents pending) was developed through a collaboration between Aerotech, Santec, and SENKO, combining expertise in motion control, optical test instrumentation, and optical connectivity. This partnership enabled the development of an alignment architecture and algorithms specifically designed for multichannel optical arrays. By tightly integrating precision motion, optical measurement and advanced software algorithms, PICAlign delivers improved optical coupling efficiency and significantly faster alignment performance.
PICAlign simplifies the integration between precision motion control, optical instrumentation and specialized alignment algorithms into a flexible, unified architecture. Aerotech motion systems deliver nanometer-level positioning, while Santec’s optical instrumentation simultaneously monitors signals across multiple channels. The PICAlign algorithms analyze these signals in real-time, enabling rapid optimization even with the complex signal loss profiles of multichannel optical devices.
PICAlign performs high-speed search routines across many degrees of freedom to identify an alignment optimum. During the search process, signals from multiple optical channels are monitored simultaneously and transmitted to the motion controller in real-time. This approach allows the system to rapidly evaluate alignment quality across the entire search space, dramatically reducing alignment time compared to traditional iterative methods.
PICAlign allows users to define custom objective functions that measure alignment quality based on application-specific requirements. Signal levels from multiple channels can be combined into a single performance metric, enabling optimization for parameters such as maximum coupling efficiency of critical channels and minimum power thresholds for all channels. Weighting factors and signal spread measurements can also be applied to ensure that the alignment optimization meets specific application requirements.
Testing has shown that monitoring multiple channels simultaneously enables the alignment algorithm to converge rapidly toward optimal positions. Alignment results within < 0.1 dB of the theoretical optimum can be achieved in seconds. Compared to single-channel alignment approaches, multichannel monitoring consistently produces significantly better alignment results in less time, improving both the yield and throughput of photonics assembly processes.
