Integrated photonics
28-04-2022 | Posted by Joaquín Martí
This article was originally published in the June 2018 issue of SIMULIA Community News, magazine and is authored by Pierre Wahl, co-Founder of Luceda Photonics.
The use and manipulation of light has always been a key component in technological fields such as telecommunications, medicine, sensing and defence. The science behind the manipulation of light is broadly known as “optics” or “photonics”. Over the last decade the possibility of integrating photonic capability on a chip has started an unprecedented wave of innovation in the optics community such that it became a field of its own: “Integrated photonics.” Already today, the use of integrated photonics has enabled order of magnitude improvements in the cost, performance and energy consumption of telecommunication while other fields are catching up quickly. Having supported R&D teams of major corporations and research institutes all over the world, advising the following to teams hoping to reap similar benefits of this exciting technology.
CONSIDER ALL THE COSTS AND BENEFITS FOR YOUR APPLICATION
While the use of integrated photonic systems almost always improves the performance of their non-integrated counterparts, an integrated photonic chip is always part of a broader system in which it has to be integrated. As integrated photonic chips have different R&D processes, production facilities and cost models than their bulk counterparts, one needs to carefully consider both the technological and economic implications of the switch. For instance, it is true that integrated chips can have a very low unit cost but that is only the case when you need a large number of them. Sweat the details about this before you start making major financial commitments.
PROCESS DESIGN KITS (PDKs) AND MULTI PROJECT WAFERS (MPWs)
To help lower the adoption risk of industrial players, the research foundries active in integrated photonics offer you the possibility to share the cost of a full development wafer among different participants by combining their designs onto a single wafer. On top of that most foundries provide process design kits or PDKs that contain tested building blocks you can easily assemble and reuse. We therefore strongly recommend recent adopters to fully utilize this option to benchmark the technology.
INVEST IN A ROBUST WORKFLOW
Electromagnetic field simulations are a very important aspect of integrated photonics design. Nevertheless, we see that, in practice, photonics design teams struggle with the organizational aspects required to consistently configure such simulations properly. It is necessary that the simulated geometry is a correct representation of the final fabricated structure, that the material models used are correct under operating conditions, and that the simulation settings are set sensibly to obtain an accurate result in a reasonable time.
Often, designers have to consult a range of sources and people (PDK handbook, process information data and the expertise of an engineer specializing in simulations) to get their simulation configured properly. As those sources are continuously updated, ensuring that your EM simulations are consistently correct is mostly an organizational challenge.
The use of software that can handle all aspect of the design flow is very important. At Luceda we collaborate with Dassault Systèmes to bring the best possible flow to our shared customers.
At Principia,we are not Luceda. But if you need help in photonics, we will make sure that you get the best. We have been helping clients to innovate for over forty years.
