The photonic integrated circuit (PIC) is a device that integrates various photonic functions in a single chip. These
photonic functions are provided by active components such as distributed feedback lasers or solid-state amplifiers and passive optoelectronic components such as arrayed waveguide gratings. The integration of these components is
accomplished by monolithic integration that restricts direct access and measurement of the input and output optical signals of individual components after fabrication, which in turn makes it difficult to precisely measure optical power within and between integrated devices. As the density of devices in a single chip increases, thermal dissipation and high temperature effects, such as thermal cross-talk and SOA gain reduction, become increasingly important issues that can adversely affect the performance of the PIC. The temperature dependence of DFB Laser/SOAs and micro-ring resonators is much higher than that of CMOS electronics and a small temperature variation may be enough for a PIC to drift out of its operational profile.
Hence, thermal management of PICs is a mandatory process that should be implemented during the design phase. The global thermal stabilization is usually achieved by using a thermoelectric cooler (TEC) module. This study proposes and evaluates the thermal profile of a PIC assembled with silicon and diamond holders using flip-chip architecture.
The flip chip offers electrical performance benefits due to negligible parasitic inductance from chip-to-package
contact. Thermally, it is more suitable than using wire bonds as this configuration provides direct contact of PIC chip
with the holder which, in turn, is connected to the TEC. The obtained results can be extrapolated to other applications,such as GaN HEMTs or high power LEDs. The evaluation was performed using ANSYS Mechanical software.