Silicon photonics is moving from research labs to the backbone of AI data center infrastructure. Demand for its ultra-high-speed, low-power optical interconnects is accelerating fast — and with it, pressure on manufacturers to scale. And as the industry races to meet that demand, a stubborn problem keeps getting in the way: yields remain far below what volume manufacturing requires, and nobody has had a reliable way to figure out why.
The root of this problem isn’t fabrication. It’s visibility.
What Testing Tools Do Today — and Why It Isn’t Enough
Conventional silicon photonics testing works on a straightforward principle: shine light in, measure light out. If the output meets spec, the device passes. If it doesn’t, it fails. What happens in between — inside the waveguides, couplers, modulators, and junctions that make up a photonic integrated circuit (PIC) — stays completely hidden.
The industry calls this “black-box testing,” and the consequences are real. When a chip fails, engineers know something went wrong, but not where, not why, and not how to stop it happening again. Root cause analysis can turn into a weeks-long exercise in manual inspection, microscopy, destructive cross-sectioning, and educated guesswork. Defective wafers pile up, scrap rates climb, and process improvements stall because there’s no reliable signal to learn from.
The physics of the devices themselves make this harder still. Variations of just tens of nanometers in waveguide width, sidewall roughness, or etch depth can hit propagation loss and phase stability hard. These defects fall below what standard optical inspection tools can detect, yet they dominate the loss budget of an entire chip. Testing only at the endpoints means any failure that originates mid-circuit simply can’t be localized — short of tearing the chip apart.
Established test equipment in the market handles electrical and endpoint optical testing well. But these tools were built for a world where the inside of the circuit wasn’t accessible. That gap in optical visibility has persisted across the industry for years.
What InZiv Does Differently
InZiv’s Omni-SiPh™ starts from a different question: what if you could actually watch light move through the circuit while it’s running?
Drawing on deep near-field optical expertise and proprietary electro-optical probing technology, Omni-SiPh captures propagating light signals from within the circuit — without contact, without disrupting device operation, and without destroying the sample. Engineers get a live map of how light travels through the PIC: where losses accumulate, where coupling efficiency degrades, how specific wavelengths behave differently across the same structure, and the precise location of any defect.
Probes are custom-engineered for each customer’s chip architecture, accommodating the full range of complex photonic configurations found in modern SiPh designs. Testing is applicable at both die and wafer level, making Omni-SiPh relevant from early R&D through process development and into production ramp.
The practical difference shows up fast. Failure root cause that previously took weeks of manual work gets pinpointed in hours. A single automated session captures optical propagation and loss mapping, coupling efficiency, wavelength-dependent behavior, and waveguide power distribution. Process engineers get data they can actually act on. Design teams close the loop between layout and performance. Foundries build the diagnostic foundation needed to push yields to where volume manufacturing needs them to be.
Seeing Inside Changes Everything
Endpoint testing tells you something failed. Omni-SiPh tells you where and why — and gives you the data to do something about it. For a market heading toward $25 billion by 2030, driven primarily by AI infrastructure demand, the cost of staying blind compounds with every wafer run.
Root cause failure analysis has long been the hallmark of mature semiconductor manufacturing. Silicon photonics has needed it for years. With Omni-SiPh, InZiv is making it possible.
To learn more or arrange a confidential demonstration on your device, visit inziv.com or contact info@inziv.com
