PyroLab and AutoGator Optical Probe Station

The expanding field of silicon photonics has demanded the use of highly precise and expensive equipment to characterize and test fabricated research devices. The cost of commercially available systems may be prohibitively expensive under the constraints of many research or academic settings. While homegrown solutions exist, the required, resource-hungry hardware can overwhelm lower-spec computers. Additionally, hardware resources shared between experimental setups sometimes requires the use of multiple computers to probe a chip effectively. Making matters worse, proprietary SDKs are often poorly documented, making the supporting code time consuming to write and difficult to maintain and port between projects. Researchers in this field have been forced to either deal with the inconvenience of an incohesive system or pay for an all-in-one package, offered by some companies, at significant cost and inflexibility. In this paper we present and demonstrate an open-source hardware and software solution for a photonic probe station with device drivers distributed across a network and aggregated by individual clients. We present two Python packages, PyroLab and AutoGator, that enable end users to remotely access probe stations and their respective hardware to organize and run automated tests on photonic chips. The open-source software and hardware combine to give silicon photonic researchers a relatively inexpensive way of probing photonic circuit elements in a controlled and systematic way. This repository contains hardware designs and recommendations for assembling and controlling a photonic integrated circuit (PIC) test station using PyroLab and AutoGator. It also contains a detailed bill of materials with links to commercial products.