Tag Archives: Lumerical Solutions Inc

Lumerical’s latest INTERCONNECT product and statistic variations in one or more circuit elements

Vancouver- (Canada) based Lumerical Solutions’ Sept. 12, 2012 (?) product announcement for its INTERCONNECT 2.0 release notes some improvements and new features,

Release 2.0 of INTERCONNECT enables PIC designers to more quickly explore the role of circuit architecture and statistical component variations on overall circuit performance.  New features include an improved frequency-domain calculation engine which can compute circuit performance significantly faster, a custom s-parameter element which can accept measured or simulated data of arbitrary complexity including complete characterization data for multimode, many-port elements, and a yield calculator that produces Monte Carlo performance estimates based on statistical variations of one or more circuit parameters.

As the company seems to do on a regular basis, they are offering a free 30-day evaluation period for the product.

The Sept. 12, 2012 product announcement offers some insight into which users might find this product most useful along with some testimonials from the product’s current users,

INTERCONNECT has been engineered, since the original product concept, to support both device and circuit designers.  Device designers are interested in component dimensions and material compositions, often with the goal of designing new proprietary circuit elements that work well with adjacent components.  Circuit designers are focused on achieving desired target performance and are often only interested in using element-level transfer functions and compact models to predict system behavior. INTERCONNECT 2.0’s yield calculator, which accepts statistical variations at the element level whether they apply to physical or phenomenological parameters, continues to support both designer profiles.

Professor Lukas Chrostowski of the University of British Columbia, and Director of the NSERC [Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council] CREATE Si-EPIC training program, believes that device designers will benefit from INTERCONNECT’s integration with MODE Solutions and FDTD Solutions.  “The software can be used to design devices such as ring resonators, waveguide Bragg gratings, arrayed waveguide gratings, and fibre grating couplers, and to study the performance of components within simple circuits,” he said.  “For example, reflections from components such as grating couplers often introduce undesired ripple in the optical spectrum, and this can be simulated using INTERCONNECT.”

As photonic integrated circuits are complex and require multi-physics simulation, the ability to create hierarchically-defined elements from single devices like a modulator to entire transmitter subsystems is very important.  Being able to experimentally verify these devices and subsystems and incorporate that data into a single design environment together with statistical variations at every level of the design hierarchy promises to streamline the design process.

“In response to ongoing requests for a framework that goes beyond idealized representations, INTERCONNECT 2.0 can incorporate statistical variations of geometrical or compact-model parameters,” according to Dr. Jackson Klein, Senior Product Manager of INTERCONNECT. “Together with INTERCONNECT’s hierarchical model definition, proprietary component-level IP can be easily incorporated into more sophisticated circuit models of arbitrary complexity.”

INTERCONNECT’s ability to model multimode, many-port circuits of arbitrary complexity and physical sophistication means it will play a critical role as designers explore circuit designs incorporating proprietary elements and ever-increasing component count.  “We look forward to our ongoing discussions with industry and foundry representatives, public and private companies, and government laboratories to refine INTERCONNECT’s capabilities so that it can best serve the emerging needs of the photonic integrated circuit design community,” says Dr. James Pond, Lumerical’s Chief Technology Officer.

University of Delaware Professor and Director of OpSIS Michael Hochberg has extensive experience working with Lumerical.  “We’re very happy with their tools and investment in the INTERCONNECT product,” he said.  “At OpSIS, our goal is to provide to anyone in the world with advanced silicon photonics processes for their own projects, while only paying for the wafer area that they use.  Doing schematic-driven design is really critical for making complex photonic circuits, and to make it easy for our users to lay out and simulate systems-on-chip we are now working with Lumerical to integrate OpSIS device libraries with their tools.”

The company has been quite active lately, the last product announcement was mentioned in my July 6, 2012 posting about Lumerical’s FDTD solution.

Lumerical and the latest incarnation of its FDTD (finite-difference time-domain) Solution

Here’s a little bit about Lumerical’s (based in Vancouver, Canada) FDTD Solutions product,

Employing the industry proven finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method, FDTD Solutions empowers designers to confront the most challenging photonic design problems. Rapid prototyping and highly-accurate simulations reduce reliance upon costly experimental prototypes, leading to a quicker assessment of design concepts and reduced product development costs.

The July 5, 2012 announcement of the FDTD 8.0 release notes this,

Release 8.0 extends the material modeling capabilities of prior versions to include the ability to model liquid crystals and other spatially-varying anisotropic materials, and a Flexible Material Plugin (FMP) framework that enables researchers to model a wide variety of other materials, including nonlinear, magneto-optical, and saturable gain materials.

The new FMP framework enables researchers to describe via computer source code a material’s polarization and magnetization as a function of the electromagnetic field and other physical quantities.  Release 8.0 is expected to contribute to the development of components in the fields of optical switching, integrated magneto-optical polarization control, quantum communications and silicon photonics owing to the wide array of nonlinear effects available in silicon.

“We’ve been in discussions with the nonlinear photonics community for years, working to understand their diverse interests and to develop a design environment that can accommodate their needs,”according to Dr. James Pond, Lumerical’s CTO.  “With the release of FDTD Solutions 8.0, researchers can quickly write a few lines of code to incorporate a Kerr medium into their simulation, or painstakingly develop hundreds of lines of code to model a multi-level atomic system.  Either way, when it comes to simulation, with FDTD Solutions 8.0 researchers can focus on developing sophisticated material models while relying on Lumerical for everything else.”

“As an existing user of Lumerical’s software, I am especially pleased by the new nonlinear optics capabilities available in FDTD Solutions 8.0,” according to Professor Robert Boyd of the University of Ottawa in Canada and the University of Rochester in the United States.  “Much of my current research entails the design of photonic structures and devices for use in applications such as all-optical switching.  The new capabilities of Lumerical will conveniently allow my group to treat both the linear and nonlinear properties of these structures using the same numerical platform.”

….

“Our team in the Electronics and Photonics Department is specialized in the area of computational electromagnetics for next-generation active devices in the fields of plasmonics, photonics and nanophotonics” according to Dr. E. P. Li, Department Director of Electronics and Photonics at the Institute for High Performance Computing in Singapore.  “As pioneers in this field, we are interested to start integrating our existing material algorithms into Lumerical’s FDTD framework.  We anticipate that this will make our advanced algorithms more accessible to a broad range of end users.”

There’s more on the FDTD Solutions product page including a video and a free 20-day download of the 8.0 release.  (You can read the full July 5, 2012 news release here.)

Vancouver (Canada)-based company, Lumerical Solutions, files patent on new optoelectronic simulation software

I’m not a huge *fan of patents as per various postings (my Oct. 31, 2011 posting is probably my most overt statement) so I’m not entirely thrilled about this news from Lumerical Solutions, Inc. According to the June 14, 2012 news item on Nanowerk,

Lumerical Solutions, Inc., a global provider of optoelectronic design software, announced the filing of a provisional patent application titled, “System and Method for Transforming a Coordinate System to Simulate an Anisotropic Medium.” The patent application, filed with the US Patent and Trademark Office, describes how the optical response of dispersive, spatially varying anisotropic media can be efficiently simulated on a discretized grid like that employed by finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) or finite-element method (FEM) simulators. The invention disclosed is relevant to a wide array of applications including liquid crystal display (LCD) panels, microdisplays, spatial light modulators, integrated components using liquid crystal on silicon (LCOS) technology like LCOS optical switches, and magneto-optical elements in optical communication and sensing systems.

The company’s June 14, 2012 news release includes this comment from the founder and Chief Technical Office (CTO),

According to Dr. James Pond, the inventor and Lumerical’s Chief Technology Officer, “many next generation opto-electronic products combine complicated materials and nano-scale structure, which is beyond the capabilities of existing simulation tools. Lumerical’s enhanced framework allows designers to accurately simulate everything from liquid crystal displays to OLEDs, and silicon photonics to integrated quantum computing components.”

Lumerical’s new methodology for efficiently simulating anisotropic media is part of a larger effort to allow designers the ability to model the optical response of many different types of materials.  In addition to the disclosed invention, Lumerical has added a material plugin capability which will enable external parties to include complicated material models, such as those required for modelling semiconductor lasers or non-linear optical devices, into FDTD-based simulation projects.

…  According to Chris Koo, an engineer with Samsung, “Lumerical’s latest innovation has established them as the clear leader in the field of optoelectronic device modeling.  Their comprehensive material modeling capabilities paves the way for the development of exciting new technologies.”

I wish the company good luck. Despite my reservations about current patent regimes, I do appreciate that in some situations, it’s best to apply for a patent.

For the curious, here’s a little more (from the company’s About Lumerical page),

By empowering research and product development professionals with high performance optical design software that leverages recent advances in computing technology, Lumerical helps optical designers tackle challenging design goals and meet strict deadlines. Lumerical’s design software solutions are employed in more than 30 countries by global technology leaders like Agilent, ASML, Bosch, Canon, Harris, Northrop Grumman, Olympus, Philips, Samsung, and STMicroelectronics, and prominent research institutions including Caltech, Harvard, Max Planck Institute, MIT, NIST and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Our Name

Lu.min.ous (loo’me-nes) adj., full of light, illuminated

Nu.mer.i.cal (noo-mer’i-kel) adj., of or relating to a number or series of numbers

Lu.mer.i.cal (loo-mer’i-kel) – A company that delivers inventive, highly accurate and cost effective design solutions resulting in significant improvements in product development costs and speed-to-market.

* June 15, 2012: I found the error this morning (9:20 am PDT) and added the word ‘fan’.