Test and Measurement Report, Part 1: Manufacturing

This is the first of three reports reviewing new developments in test-and-measurement equipment. This one covers equipment used in manufacturing. Subsequent ones will deal with equipment used in the field, for installation and maintenance; and equipment in laboratories for research and development applications.

Why is Light Reading making such a big deal out of test and measurement? Because it's going through huge changes, partly because manufacturing is being automated – which means testing and measurement can no longer be something that's done as a separate operation between one manual process and another.

That, however, is only one of the reasons why test and measurement is undergoing radical change. Others include:

All of this adds up to a lot of challenges for manufacturers in this field – and a lot of opportunities for startups to come up with new developments that might give them headstarts in emerging test-and-measurement markets.

The bottom line? It's time for an update. This report identifies some of the key developments in this field and points to interesting startups and noteworthy products. Here's a hyperlinked summary:

Automation
A big push to automate assembly of components is radically altering test-and-measurement requirements.

A Test in Time
Spotting duds and weeding them out early is key to cutting manufacturing costs.

Wide and Deep
New test-and-measurement gear mines for more detail in more places.

Integration
Moves to integrate passive and active devices in the same optical component have been mirrored by comparable integration of test-and-measurement gear.

Clean Sweep
Swept wavelength testing could revolutionize DWDM testing.

— Carl Weinschenk, Senior Editor, Light Reading
http://www.lightreading.comAmong the most dramatic changes in test-and-measurement equipment are those occurring in the assembly of optical components, which has been the subject of a big automation drive in recent years.

The market for this type of equipment is growing rapidly, according to ElectroniCast Corp. The market research firm estimates that automated assembly and related test-and-measurement gear represented a $722 million market in 2000. It expects this to more than double by 2005, to $1.71 billion.

In this period, the proportion of fully automated assembly lines will grow from 2 percent to 7 percent, according to Electronicast. The proportion of semi-automated assembly lines will grow from 69 percent to 74 percent.

Companies to Watch

Zygo Corp. (Nasdaq: ZIGO)

Zygo is among a bunch of firms working on test gear that scans components for defects as they're being made, cutting down on the number of bad parts and increasing the volume of good ones. The goal is to combine manufacturing tools with existing devices that perform non-contact metrology, a scanning process so named because it doesn't involve touching the components in question.

"The goal is to measure inside the tool, even though no one's doing that now," says John Roth, product manager in Zygo's metrology group.

At the upcoming Optical Fiber Communication Conference and Exhibit (OFC), Zygo plans to unveil a product called ZOBAS (short for Zygo Optical Bench Assembly System). This will combine some functions of the company's metrology instruments with a fabrication platform for optical components. It will be Zygo's first crack at packing measurement with manufacturing tools for photonic parts.

Zygo has other metrology products that it plans to show at OFC as well. The rather comically named "MicroLUPI" doesn't work inside manufacturing tools just yet; but it does the next best thing, Roth says, by measuring components rapidly enough to avoid bottlenecks during fabrication.

[For more information on OFC 2002, please visit: www.nottheofc.com]

The MicroLUPI, Roth asserts, cuts out the time taken by a human technician to aim a metrology instrument at an optical lens. "We have hardware and software algorithms that automatically align and measure a lens for inspection." Instead of taking two minutes to scope the lens manually, the MicroLUPI checks it in 15 seconds or less, he says. Links to quality-control software help track the progress of production.

The company also has a product called the NewView Optical Profiler that scans MEMS (micro-electro-mechanical system) components specifically.

Zygo will be marketing the MicroLUPI and NewView tools to the likes of Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYSE: A), Corning Inc. (NYSE: GLW), Digital Optics Corp., and JDS Uniphase Inc. (Nasdaq: JDSU; Toronto: JDU).

Veeco Instruments Inc. (Nasdaq: VECO)

Veeco will also be active at OFC, showing its metrology system called the Wyko Optical Profiler, which competes with Zygo's. Veeco spokespeople say efforts to combine metrology and manufacturing are underway, but no products have been announced yet.

Katsina Optics

This newly funded company plans to unveil at OFC what it calls "a new product line featuring passive component test technology integrated with semi-automated tools." According to spokespeople, Katsina's line (also aimed at R&D) will include a "sub-micron optical fiber alignment system and an automated fiber stripper," both of which cut the time required to check out devices in the manufacturing process.

Nano-Or Technologies

This Israeli startup offers a tiny camera capable of recording the dimensions of components either from within microscopes used by technicians or within manufacturing gear – or in situ, as it's termed.

The company was cofounded by Eyal Shekel, who also cofounded Chiaro Networks, a stealth-mode startup developing a scaleable Internet Protocol (IP) core router (see Chiaro Lands an $80 Million Round).

Nano-Or hopes to launch its product in the third quarter 2002. "We're already talking to various instrument vendors," says David Banitt, Nano-Or's CEO. He says Nano-Or would like to OEM its cameras to vendors of so-called "machine vision" equipment, which combines sensitive instruments for assembling optical components with algorithms and software that automate the manufacturing process. This pairing would result in tools that automatically check and measure parts as they are made, cutting down on duds, increasing automation and output, and streamlining the overall production process.

Banitt says he's feeling out a range of vendors and a couple of deals are imminent, but he won't be specific. Vendors that make machine vision systems for use in optical component fabrication include the likes of Applied Materials Inc. and KLA-Tencor Corp.

Banitt anticipates the market for optical components to represent 30 to 40 percent of revenues for Nano-Or's tiny cameras in the future. Another promising market is semiconductor fabrication. The startup, founded in October 2000 with $3.5 million in funding from Jerusalem Global Ventures, STI Ventures, and Dellet Ventures, is putting its second funding round together now, Banitt says.

EXFO Electro-Optical Engineering Inc. (Nasdaq: EXFO; Toronto: EXF)

EXFO makes a range of equipment for automating the assembly of components. This includes very precise alignment of parts, integrated testing, and bonding. The company's latest development, the ProAlign 5000 Component Assembly Workstation, was launched this week (see EXFO Launches Semi-Auto Workstation).

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Now that driving down costs has become such a priority for practically everybody in the telecom equipment food chain, much more emphasis is being placed on weeding out dud devices as early as possible.

If a defect can be detected in a device while it's still on a wafer, for example, a huge amount of money can be saved by jetissoning it before undergoes subsequent operations – being cut into a single chip and packaged. Packaging, in particular, often represents a large proportion of manufacturing costs.

Back in the boom times, avoidance of waste wasn't such an issue, according to Linda Rae, the general manager of Keithley Instruments Inc. (NYSE: KEI), a test equipment maker. “There were areas where [manufacturers] really understood they could operate in a much more efficient fashion, but they had no time – and the cost savings didn’t justify versus the time cranking out the orders. Now that situation has completely changed.”

This issue is particularly pertinent to semiconductor lasers, partly because yields are typically low, and partly because some types of laser – like Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Lasers (VCSELs) – can be tested while they're still on the wafer, but other types of laser can't.

This is the fundamental reason why VCSELs are often much cheaper than side-emitting lasers, which can only be tested once the wafer has been diced and the chips have undergone some further manufacturing processes. Of course, VCSELs have their own drawbacks – one of them being that longer-wavelength versions are particularly challenging to mass manufacture (see Laser Blazers).

Testing lasers while they're still on the wafer calls for different equipment than usual, because early-stage devices are more susceptible to damage. Also, according to Rae, traditional test equipment can produce inaccurate results when used in this environment.

Keithley has developed pulse testing gear (its Model 2520) that sends an electrical charge of very short duration through the immature chip. This, Rae says, avoids possible damage.

Other Products

EXFO Electro-Optical Engineering Inc. (Nasdaq: EXFO; Toronto: EXF)

EXFO says its PCA-8000 Passive Component Analyzer can be used in ways similar to Keithley's Model 2520.

Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYSE: A)

Agilent has teamed its Photonic Foundation Library (see Page 5) and its light measurement system to automatically identify bad wafers or chips in planar lightwave circuits. This is an early-stage process, focusing on measures of spectral loss and polarization dependence. It enables bad pieces to be trashed before fiber is attached, temperature control electronics added, and the unit is packaged.

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Test-and-measurement equipment vendors are always updating their gear so that it does more – either measuring more things simultaneously or delivering even deeper analysis.

That trend has accelerated recently, partly because it's required for automation and partly because of economic pressures. “What we are seeing with the layoffs in the equipment community is that people who are left are asked to do more,” says Gary Mading, CTO of Gnubi Communications, a company making test equipment for transmission gear.

Companies making test equipment for component manufacturers hold the same view. “If telecom is going to be a viable industry in terms of optical components, there’s a desperate need for fully integrated and automated test equipment,” says Tom Cellucci, president and CEO of Etec Inc., a maker of test gear for MEMS and other components.

“Now the process is to put things together manually, which is very low-yield compared to what is going to be required in the medium- to long-term," says Celluci. "It’s easy to make one of something. Making millions with good gross margins is another story." A key part of this transition will be fully automated and integrated test and measurement.

It's a similar picture among manufacturers of protocol analyzers. Testing at Layers 2 and 3 used to be done separately, according to Mark Fishburn, vice president of technical strategy for Spirent Communications. Now, analyzers come with software that can gauge the ability of the devices to support class of service, scaleability of router flaps, number of VPN (virtual private network) tunnels, and other sophisticated parameters.

Products

Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYSE: A)

Agilent's 81910A or rAPT Photonic All-parameter Analyzer combines measures of spectral insertion loss and polarization dependent loss with group delay and differential group delay and presents measures of both the transmission and reflection path at once, according to the company.

Gnubi Communications

Gnubi’s EPX 16 simultaneously measures signal rates and analyzes a range of transmission protocols.

Etec Inc.

Etec’s M/STeP-o Optical MEMS Wafer/Die Test System is capable of supporting myriad tests in the same platform. It can be configured for pilot product production and full manufacturing, according to Cellucci.

Circadiant Systems

Circadiant’s A3300 Optical Standards Tester family consolidates physical layer, Sonet (Synchronous Optical NETwork) and SDH (Synchronous Digital Hierarchy), packet-over-Sonet, and Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) in a single device. The A3303 handles bandwidths of up to 2.5 Gbit/s; the A3306, about to be released, will handle bandwidths up to 10 Gbit/s, according to CEO and cofounder John French.

Tektronix Inc. (NYSE: TEK)

The Optical Test Systems product family from Tektronix is often used to test multiple DWDM channels simultaneously, according to the company.

EXFO Electro-Optical Engineering Inc. (Nasdaq: EXFO; Toronto: EXF)

EXFO's IQ-12004B DWDM Passive Component Test System integrates an optical switch within a traditional DWDM test device to enable fast and accurate measure of either multiple components or single components with multiple input ports. The unit is aimed at passives (such as optical crossconnects) or arrayed components (such as variable optical attenuators and DWDM multiplexers). Key parameters measured are insertion loss, polarization dependent loss (PDL), and optical return loss.

Ixia (Nasdaq: XXIA)

Ixia's Automated Network Validation Library (ANVL) is software designed to determine how well a network device's protocol implementation is jibing with the standard specs for that protocol. It is used for Layer 3 switches, RA servers, backbone routers, and end nodes.

The company also offers Routing Protocol Analyzer tools that emulate protocols including the Routing Information Protocol (RIP), Intermediate System-Intermediate System (IS-IS), Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS), Open Shortest Path First (OSPF), and Border Gateway Protocol (BGP).

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As the components industry comes to grips with tighter integration of devices in subsystems, the bar is raised on the test and measurement gear needed to check that everything's working properly.

Using different testers to measure different characteristics of the same subsystem doesn't cut it, according to Keithley's Linda Rae.“It starts to become inefficient to go down the traditional path." In order to trace what's going on among different parts of a subsystem, it's necessary to collect measurements at multiple points at the same time.

To make matters even more challenging, additional parameters need to be monitored as data rates increase. Various types of dispersion come to have a much bigger influence, for instance. And, of course, the run-of-the-mill stuff – e.g., insertion loss and crosstalk – still needs to be measured.

Products

Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYSE: A)

Agilent's Photonic Foundation Library was unveiled a year ago with the specific purpose of helping manufacturers coordinate testing of passive components. It's a software suite that communicates with different test modules in a way that enables them to be used together to conduct a sequence of tests. It works best with Agilent's own test modules but can coordinate other vendors' equipment.

The bottom line is that considerable cost savings can be made, at the same time as speeding up production, according to Agilent.

Agilent gives the following examples of requirements for an integrated approach to component testing:

EXFO Electro-Optical Engineering Inc. (Nasdaq: EXFO; Toronto: EXF)

EXFO's IQS-500 Intelligent Test System, which was introduced earlier this year, can control as many as 100 interchangeable test modules with a single controller unit, according to the company.

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Great advances in dense wavelength-division multiplexing are forcing manufacturers and their test and measurement vendors to develop new approaches. A key development is a new way to test and characterize passive DWDM equipment.

A new approach began emerging three years ago, according to Mark Wippich, product manager at New Focus Inc. (Nasdaq: NUFO).

Initially, DWDM passive components were tested by setting a tunable laser to the desired frequency and taking the required readings. This is known as "step-and-measure" testing. It's a relatively time-consuming procedure, however, and the explosion of DWDM wavelengths was threatening to make adequate testing a bottleneck. according to Wippich.

The new approach – called "swept wavelength" testing – focuses on performing the required measurements without stopping and locking onto the specific wavelength.

This isn’t easy, however. In order to do this, a new generation of lasers capable of doing such “drive-by testing” was necessary. A new procedure for plotting the data culled from the tests – upwards of tens of thousands of points – was also needed.

New Focus supplies components for swept wavelength testing, but not whole systems. JDS Uniphase Inc. (Nasdaq: JDSU; Toronto: JDU) was first in the market, according to Wippich. He expects the coming OFC Conference to feature further entrants into the swept wavelength testing space.

Products

JDS Uniphase Inc. (Nasdaq: JDSU; Toronto: JDU)

JDS Uniphase has a non-stop DWDM tester called the SWS-CD , which stands for Swept Wavelength System - Chromatic Dispersion. It measures group delay, chromatic dispersion, and insertion loss of passive optical components.

New Focus Inc. (Nasdaq: NUFO)

New Focus’s Model 6528 Swept-Wavelength Tunable Laser Source has a 100nm-per-second tuning speed. Designed for high volume testing of WDM components, the unit can be independently configured by manufacturers or system vendors, according to the company. It covers the entire C and L bands.

NetTest

NetTest's Tunics-Plus series of hop-free tunable lasers has a range of 150nm at 0 dBm and 70nm at 8 dBm, according to the company.

Ixia (Nasdaq: XXIA)

Ixia's BERT load modules are designed for all optical and DWDM systems. They support speeds of OC3 to OC48, including Fibre Channel and Gigabit Ethernet.

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