Authors:	W. Bogaerts
Title:	Silicon Photonics and the open IPKISS design framework
Format:	International Conference Proceedings
Publication date:	3/2012
Journal/Conference/Book:	Photonics Event NL 2012 (invited)
Volume(Issue):	p.IP.2
Location:	Nieuwegein, Netherlands
Citations:	Look up on Google Scholar
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Abstract

We will present a view on how the complexity of Silicon photonics poses new photonic design challenges, and how the open IPKISS framework provides an avenue to address these.
Silicon Photonics has become one of the fastest growing fields in integrated photonics, driven by a strong push for technologies that enable complex photonic functionality for efficient short-range optical interconnects and optical sensing platforms. From a technological point of view, silicon photonics offers the relevant building blocks, up to recent demonstrations of heterogeneously integrated III-V laser sources. The technology also allows extreme miniaturization of photonic components, which in turn enables compact chips, but more important, complex photonic circuits. As in electronics, complexity can significantly boost performance of entire circuits, even when individual building blocks are not the best-in-class. However, this complexity also presents a serious challenge: Reliably designing complex photonic circuits is not straightforward, and there is no single suite of tools that provides a comprehensive design solution. The vast mismatch in physical time scales (THz) and operational time scales (kHz to GHz) and the complex (multiphysical) dynamics make it difficult to capture all photonic effects in efficient models, and often requires multiple disjoint tools to simulate photonic components and circuits with confidence. IPKISS provides a script-driven design framework that can link up multiple tools from a description of a photonic component, and can generate physical layout, electromagnetic simulation, mode solving and circuit simulation. IPKISS is also vendor-agnostic and open-source, and communicates with established simulation tools such as MIT’s MEEP simulator.