OmniSim

What is OmniSim?

Get the most versatile photonic simulation software package

OmniSim is a powerful and flexible simulation package for the design and optimisation of nano-photonic and plasmonic devices.

It features a very flexible layout editor which allows you to design virtually any photonic device you want, and it is packed with a complete suite of high-performance 3D and 2D Maxwell solvers, including

• our FDTD Engine : a state-of-the-art 2D/3D Finite Difference Time Domain engine, probably the most popular propagation algorithm for photonics.

• our FETD Engine : our unique 2D/3D Finite Element Time Domain tool, ideal for modelling plasmonics, metamaterials or graphene-based devices accurately.

• our FEFD Engine : a high-speed 2D Finite Element Frequency Domain, ideal for fast prototyping and optimisation.

• our RCWA Engine : an innovative implementation of the Rigorous Coupled-Wave Analysis method for the modelling of periodic structures, metamaterials and diffractive optical elements.

A unique combination of FDTD and FETD simulators

OmniSim is the only software package to include both FDTD and FETD engines. This combination allows you to get the best of both worlds: FDTD for quick approximate simulations and FETD for higher accuracy, or even just to check your FDTD calculations with an alternative method.

FDTD (Finite-Difference Time-Domain) is a powerful and popular simulation method for photonics, and it will allow you to obtain initial results quickly for a large variety of structures. The downfall of FDTD is when you need to refine the resolution - a 10x refinement in grid spacing will typically result in a 1,000x increase in memory use and a 10,000x increase in calculation time! This can be a big problem when modelling surface plasmons in metallic structures, where very fine resolution is routinely needed to obtain accurate results.

This is where our FETD (Finite-Element Time-Domain) simulator steps in, allowing you to obtain highly accurate results in a fraction of the time needed for FDTD, even for challenging problems like plasmonics or metamaterials.

FDTD and FETD are two truly complementary methods, which can be used to model structures of similar size and complexity. With OmniSim, you can choose the most efficient calculation method for your structure, and you can also model your design with two independent engines - ideal to check the accuracy of your simulations!

An extensive simulation toolkit

In addition to the 2D/3D FDTD and FETD engines, OmniSim also includes a state-of-the-art 2D/3D RCWA engine, which will allow you to model diffraction gratings and metamaterials with great efficiency.

It also includes an extremely fast 2D FEFD simulator (Finite Element Frequency Domain) and automatic optimisation with Kallistos.

It also includes a powerful PWE-based Band Solver for photonic crystal structures as part of its CrystalWave add-on. 

OmniSim is available as a native 32-bit and 64-bit application. The 64-bit version of OmniSim allows you to include large amounts of memory in your FEFD and FDTD calculations. In combination with the symmetric multi-processing capability of the FDTD and FETD engines, this enables OmniSim to simulate large devices at very high speed!

User friendly design of photonic structures

OmniSim allows you to design photonic components such as waveguides, ring resonators or gratings in just a few clicks. Its Surface Grating Coupler Design Utility allows you to automatically design and optimise surface grating couplers in 2D and 3D.

For photonic crystal modelling please see also CrystalWave.

Platforms

PC min spec: Win 8/10 x64, 4GB RAM, Intel Haswell, AMD Ryzen2 or later CPU.
UNIX / Linux: Clustered version available on UNIX / Linux systems.