Customer Success: LIGENTEC

“With its fast simulation performance and a high level of consistency with experimental data, Lumerical’s DEVICE Suite enabled LIGENTEC to optimize the performance of its new advance heater module reducing time to market and development budget needed,” Managing Director at Ligentec, Dr. Zervas.

Business Need

LIGENTEC recently released its new advanced heater module, P1, providing increased thermo-optical tuning range and improved reliability for tunable ring resonators and Mach Zehnder Interferometer (MZI). P1 extends the capabilities of the all-nitride AN800 process with waveguides that offer low bending radii (< 0.005 dB for 10 turns of 50um radius), low coupling losses (< 1 dB/facet), low propagation losses (< 0.1 dB/cm) and high power handling (up to 10 W tested). During the design of the heater model, LIGENTEC needed the ability to perform fast multiphysics simulations that could seamlessly capture the complex interactions between optical, electrical and thermal effects at the physical level. To achieve high levels of consistency between the fabricated and simulated designs, they needed the flexibility to import data into material models with high fidelity. This was especially important for LIGENTEC due to the significantly low loss characteristic of its AN core technology.

Multiphysics Simulation with Lumerical’s DEVICE Suite

LIGENTEC chose to design their P1 heater module using Lumerical’s DEVICE Suite, which performs multiphysics simulation of heat and electrical conduction, combined with photonics simulation, including relevant material models in each physical domain. The DEVICE Suite proved to be an ideal platform for designing photonic integrated circuits (PICs) targeted for LIGENTEC’s All-Nitride (AN) process. Lumerical’s simulators allowed for the import of measured data into its material models to maximize simulation accuracy, which is especially important for next-generation processes.

Result

With the help of Lumerical’s DEVICE Suite, LIGENTEC was successful in delivering the P1 advanced heater module that provides 4 times more thermal-optical tuning and improved stability for tunable ring resonators and Mach Zehnder Interferometer (MZI) than standard heaters in SIN. In addition to increased tuning range, there is also a reduction in thermal drift. A ring resonator with a free spectral range (FSR) of 500 GHz (resonance separation of 4 nm), for example, can be tuned by more than 4 nm operating at telecom wavelength range and thus covering a full tuning of the FSR. Similarly for MZIs, multiple pi-phase shifts are possible.