VANCOUVER, British Columbia,
Nov. 8, 2019 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ --
CompoundTek, a global foundry services leader in emerging silicon
photonic solutions (SiPh), today announces the tapeout of a reduced
footprint grating coupler for photonic I/O. The grating couplers
were designed and optimized using photonic inverse design (PID) in
conjunction with Lumerical's industry leading FDTD nanophotonic
simulator. Lumerical's PID capability enables photonic designers to
rapidly develop entirely new functionality with improved
performance, reduced footprint, and more robust
manufacturability.
"With this successful tapeout in partnership with Lumerical,
customers will be able to access Lumerical's PID solution with
confidence when taping-out to CompoundTek in the future. The
integration into our design flow, design partners and open SiPh
manufacturing platform ecosystem will accelerate the adoption of
SiPh solutions for various applications ranging from datacom
transceivers, smart sensor, bio-medical, automotive LiDAR, quantum
computing and artificial intelligence," said KS Ang, Chief
Operating Officer, CompoundTek.
The SiPh grating coupler is a key functional block for photonic
I/O, enabling light to be coupled from fiber into and out of a
photonic integrated circuit. Unlike end-fire edge couplers, grating
couplers can be located anywhere on chip, enabling additional
applications such as sense and test. With this flexibility comes
the requirement for reduced footprint while maintaining high
coupling efficiency. However, with over 100 design parameters,
grating couplers are geometrically complex, rendering traditional
optimization techniques impractical. Lumerical's PID technology
enables designers to automatically and reliably generate optimal
grating couplers with hundreds of free parameters. Testimony to its
effectiveness, CompoundTek's SiPh new grating couplers have been
reduced in size by 20x and promise improved coupling
efficiency.
"These new grating couplers will enable our customers to create
improved commercial designs with higher yields and faster time to
market," said Lumerical CTO, James
Pond. "PID's powerful optimization algorithms leverage
adjoint sensitivity analysis to explore design spaces that are
impractical by other means. Coupled with Lumerical's industry
leading FDTD solver, PID enables designers to efficiently explore
and optimize designs with hundreds or more design parameters. In
contrast, traditional design approaches are limited to a small
number of established device designs, exploring much smaller
parameter spaces, typically fewer than ten parameters."
CompoundTek's SiPh MPW platform offers a highly flexible
solution for photonic integrated circuit developers requiring rapid
design and manufacture, necessitating multiple variants of the new
grating couplers. New capabilities introduced with Lumerical's
2020a release allow PID to run efficiently on HPC resources, and
include job checkpointing, support for Amazon Linux, and online
self activation for FDTD Burst Packs. Other notable PID features
such as global optimization allow designers to efficiently explore
a broad design space and co-optimize for process and packaging
variation for the creation of robust designs. Rapidly scaling up
with Lumerical's HPC cloud deployment reduced the design cycle for
the optimized grating couplers for all eight variants to under two
weeks.
The Python based open source PID implementation is packaged
together with Lumerical FDTD for ease of deployment. Alternatively,
the original source code is freely available on GitHub at
https://github.com/chriskeraly/lumopt. To help new users get
started with PID, examples are included in Lumerical's application
gallery to speed designers' time to implementation (see
https://apps.lumerical.com/inverse-design-grating-coupler.html).
More information on Lumerical's Automation API, required to run
PID, can be found at https://www.lumerical.com/products/aapi.
To find out more about CompoundTek's Silicon Photonics platform,
MPW schedule and PDK, contact enquiries@compoundtek.com.
About CompoundTek Pte Ltd
Founded and supported by industry veterans and technologists,
Singapore-based CompoundTek
combines world-class commercial foundry with leading silicon
photonics (SiPh) research institutes to provide cutting-edge SiPh
technologies that enhance foundry services capabilities. As one of
the elites offering SiPh solutions internationally, CompoundTek
brings to the marketplace revolutionary semiconductor applications
designed to meet critical requirements in high bandwidth and high
data transfer solutions particularly in emerging connectivity
driving Industry 4.0. The company's in-depth know-how includes
end-to-end technologies - from proprietary fabrication process
expertise to product design support with strategic partners and
extended services for end-product manufacturing.
About Lumerical
Lumerical develops photonic simulation software – tools which
enable product designers to understand light, and predict how it
behaves within complex structures, circuits, and systems. Since
being founded in 2003, Lumerical has grown to license its design
tools in over 50 countries and its customers include 13 of the top
15 technology companies in the FORTUNE Global 500 index, and 46 of
the top 50 research universities as rated by the Times Higher
Education rankings. Lumerical's substantial impact on the photonic
design and simulation community means its tools are among the most
widely cited in the scientific press, with references in more than
10,000 scientific publications and patents. Lumerical enables its
customers to achieve more with light and establish a leading
position in the development of transformative technologies
employing photonics.
SOURCE Lumerical Inc.