Mechatronics · 2025
Critical Frequency Design
PIC Probing Station
A benchtop probing station for photonic integrated circuits that finds peak optical alignment on its own.
- Role
- Mechanical + software
- Company
- Critical Frequency Design
- Year
- Summer 2025
- Tools
- C#, Python, Zaber stages
Problem
Probing a photonic chip meant aligning the probe to peak light output by hand. Alignment took up most of the test time, results varied between operators, and there was no repeatable way to find the best probe position.
What I did
I designed the mechanical alignment stack and wrote the motion and scan software. A C# program drives Zaber motion stages through a cubic spiral, recording optical power at each point to build a 3D map of light through the chip.
The probe then moves to the brightest point and repeats the scan at a finer resolution until it converges. I analyzed the map data in Python.
Result
The operator starts the sequence and the station finds peak transmission with no further input. Run-to-run variance dropped, and other operators can run the full test without help setting up.