Photon Design, a global leader in photonic simulation CAD software, has developed its Multi-Topology (MT)-FIMMPROP simulator to model PICs and passive waveguide devices, within a single design environment. This unique approach allows engineers using MT-FIMMPROP to produce component designs, circuit simulations, and layouts, concurrently, simplifying and accelerating the design process. The component design part draws on Photon Design’s, pioneering, EigenMode Expansion (EME), computational model, to simulate distinct, optical regions of a waveguide. These are simply repeated or combined to form a component. Circuit simulation allows multiple components to be connected, natively, showing spectral response performance, with layout simulation and one-click GDS-II export included, so engineers can stay entirely within MT-FIMMPROP as they work.

Dr. Dominic Gallagher, CEO of Photon Design, said, “MT-FIMMPROP delivers unprecedented design simplicity and processing efficiency for engineers designing waveguides. This can be clearly demonstrated using a pulley coupler example. The component design simulates the active, coupling and decoupling regions, which are combined and repeated to form the pulley coupler shape. All non-active areas within the device bounding box are ignored, and only its resonant wavelength is included in the simulation.

“This approach makes MT-FIMMPROP’s computational processing speed extremely fast, at just a few minutes. Also, this processing speed is largely unaffected if the device size increases, as the computational requirements remain similar. By comparison, the industry-standard, FDTD-based computational models process the entire bounding box of a waveguide at multiple wavelengths, irrespective of optical activity. Not only can this approach take many hours to process (often offered as an expensive cloud service) but also processing takes even longer as the device size increases, such as for a larger pulley coupler.

“MT-FIMMPROP is well suited to PIC or waveguide device designs, especially those with repeated, optical zones, such as cascade MMI’s, pulley couplers, ring resonators, delay lines and long arm MZI with Euler bends. It offers reduced engineering design time and fast simulation speeds, supporting the iterative approach engineers use for designing waveguides.”