Ever wondered how you find a fault in a component a few millimetres long, or how anyone keeps testing when connectors are getting smaller and denser every year? Luna Innovations has some answers, and Fibre Systems editor Keely Portway caught up with the team at its ECOC 2026 booth in Málaga to hear them.
Wajih Daab, Senior Director of Product Management at Luna Innovations, explained that AI is driving huge demand for optical interconnects, and that testing is becoming the bottleneck. As co-packaged optics, connectors and fibre arrays get smaller and more packed with ports, it gets harder to tell what’s going wrong, and that can slow everyone down.
Luna’s approach is less about asking whether a device passes overall and more about finding exactly where the problem is. Its technology measures loss and reflections along a device, and can control lengths with high precision, from a few millimetres up to a few metres.
Testing chips before they’re packaged
Testing bare wafers and dies brings its own headaches, particularly because many of these devices are sensitive to polarisation. Daab said customers often turn to fibre-based polarisation controllers, which keep losses low and handle high power. That matters because you can push a powerful laser onto the chip while keeping the sensitive parts elsewhere in the light path safe.
Daab also said the team had a busy show, and was glad to catch up with customers and hear what they’re struggling with.