The transition from research to commercial product development in integrated photonics is intensifying and the applications space continues to expand. Applications in data centers, in particular, are driving adoption of photonic circuits. To support these trends, existing domain specific design methodologies must combine to provide the most efficient and least error prone design environment, enabling reliable design, optimization and analysis of both electronic and photonics circuits.
Built around the Virtuoso® custom IC design platform, an electronic-photonic design automation (EPDA) environment has been developed to enable schematic-driven designs, simulation, and layout for monolithic/hybrid integrated electronic and photonics circuits.

Hierarchical schematic-driven design
- Support fully hierarchical design
- Support schematic capture and netlist partition for electrical and optical components

Schematic-driven simulation
- Co-simulate electro-optical integrated circuit in transient domain with the integration of Spectre® AMS Designer and INTERCONNECT
- Check simulation results in Virtuoso Results Browser

Schematic-driven layout
- Draw photonics curvilinear layout using Virtuoso CurvyCore™ infrastructure or SKILL® programming
- Create waveguide routing layout and calculate layout-dependent mode properties
- Back-annotate waveguide mode properties from layout to schematic for post-layout simulation

Photonics PDK verification
- Assure PDK quality by checking consistency of the PDK components across files for Virtuoso schematic symbols and INTERCONNECT behavioral models

Statistical support
- Load CML Compiler generated libraries with statistical compact models
- Perform optical corner analysis by calling Interconnect directly from Virtuoso
- Perform statistical co-simulation (both Monte Carlo and Corner)
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