VLC Photonics transfers PIC test and assembly to new facility
Spanish company VLC Photonics, part of the Hitachi Group, has transferred its PIC testing and assembly operations to new headquarters at the Táctica Industrial Park in Paterna, Valencia.
The move concludes a phased relocation that began with the transfer of the company’s non-technical teams to the new offices in November 2025.
The new facility spans 1,545 m2 comprising 315 m2 of cleanroom space, 480 m2 of laboratories, and 750 m2 of offices. The cleanroom is certified to ISO Class 7 (Class 10,000) with full ESD protection, and the R&D characterisation performed in an adjacent ISO Class 8 laboratory. All testing, assembly, and metrology equipment and instrumentation is now installed and operating at the new site.
The relocated infrastructure supports a full range of characterisation and test services VLC Photonics offers to PIC developing companies, photonic foundries, system integrators, and research organisations.
These include wafer-level testing with fully automated probe alignment at nanometer precision, both for vertical and edge coupling through trenches, covering optical, electrical DC, and RF parameters; die-level testing on both semi-automated and fully automated platforms, supporting edge and vertical grating coupling, with automated chip and fibre pick, place, and attachment, and throughput exceeding 1,000 dies per month; and packaged PIC testing for chip-on-board and chip-on-carrier assemblies.
Electrical characterisation is offered up to 110 GHz, with NRZ and PAM4 signal generation and real-time analysis at 256 GSa/s for eye diagram and bit error rate evaluation. Optical characterisation from 350 nm to 4,000 nm, spans visible, near-infrared, and mid- infrared wavelengths, including full polarisation control.
Assembly capabilities for test boards include semi-automatic wire bonding, flip-chip at- tachment, fiber array attachment, and high-precision 2D/3D optical metrology. Reliability testing includes thermal test in a humidity-controlled climatic chamber for high- temperature operating life (HTOL), high-temperature storage (HTS), temperature cycling
Iñigo Artundo, CEO, VLC Photonics: “Moving our labs is not something a test house does lightly, especially after having grown over 15 years on our previous location. Completing the transfer with every system back in operation in record time is a credit to our engineering team. What matters to our customers is what it means: we now control our own environment end to end, which means we set the schedule, we protect the samples, and we can scale capacity as the market demands . Photonic integration is moving from prototype volumes toward real production volumes, and this facility is how we help our customers reach there faster and more reliable, in a cost cost-effective”
VLC Photonics, founded in 2011 as a spin-off of the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), still maintains after the move an active presence on the university high-tech campus for R&D collaborations, and with the local PIXEurope photonics pilot line.
The announcement comes ahead of ECOC 2026, held also at Spain in Malaga from September 21 to 23, where VLC Photonics will be exhibiting.
