Vancouver, BC (February 29, 2012)
Lumerical Solutions, Inc. (www.lumerical.com), a global provider of nanophotonic design software, today announced the release of INTERCONNECT 1.0, a photonic integrated circuit design environment for the analysis of integrated optical circuits, silicon photonics components and optical interconnects. With its unique combination of time and frequency domain simulators, its ability to interoperate with device-level design tools, and its high performance simulation engine that can address bidirectional, multimode circuit topologies, INTERCONNECT offers a robust, adaptable and flexible design environment that can address the evolving needs of the photonics community.
“In our consultations with end-users, we see a clear need for a robust optical circuit simulator that can account for real manufacturing processes, adapt to evolving standards and integrate within existing EDA design flows,” said Dr. James Pond, CTO of Lumerical. “Our aggressive product release schedule, collaborative product development approach and superior technical support helps ensure that INTERCONNECT will be at the forefront of photonic integrated circuit design.”
Robust Simulation Technology
INTERCONNECT offers a rich multimode modeling framework that has been engineered to address challenging design problems. Full electromagnetic device models constructed with Lumerical’s FDTD and MODE Solutions products can be incorporated within INTERCONNECT circuit descriptions, allowing for the inclusion of complex device-level physics to simulate realistic photonic integrated circuits.
According to Dr. Jackson Klein, Senior Product Manager at Lumerical and INTERCONNECT technical lead, “while it is easy with INTERCONNECT to quickly prototype photonic integrated circuit designs using idealized elements, our goal is to go well beyond the ability of addressing existing PIC simulators. With its ability to handle multimode waveguide sections, and devices with strong feedback, large index contrasts and high quality factors, INTERCONNECT will enable designers to tackle real-world design challenges.”
A Customizable Framework that Addresses Diverse Requirements
To address the diverse requirements of the silicon photonics community, users can create customized elements and element libraries within INTERCONNECT. User-defined custom circuit elements allows designers to innovate at the block level, while providing the ability for the larger community to develop element libraries to share development costs and design experience while adapting to evolving industry standards.
According to Michael Hochberg, an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Delaware, and director of the OpSIS effort, “as processes stabilize and device-level models mature, there is a definite need for a higher-level modeling solution, and Lumerical’s new INTERCONNECT software is definitely a step in the right direction. We are big believers in this kind of system-level simulation, and we look forward to working closely with Lumerical on integrating design kits, and to helping them to refine and tune this software over the coming years.”
A Flexible Design Environment for Tomorrow’s Design Challenges
With a unique combination of both time and frequency domain simulation engines, INTERCONNECT can be applied to any photonic integrated circuit design problem. With the prevalence of high quality factor resonators in many current silicon photonic designs, the scattering data simulator of INTERCONNECT offers the ability for designers to generate highly accurate results quickly.
“I look forward to incorporating INTERCONNECT into the design flow for Lightwire’s next generation silicon photonic products,” according to Mark Webster at Lightwire, Inc. “Utilizing both time domain and frequency domain techniques for photonic integrated circuit simulations, combined with well characterized library elements is a very powerful combination. The interoperability with Lumerical’s leading FDTD and MODE tools for optical device characterization further enhance this capability. This is an important new development for the photonics community.”