This poster presents our work on rapid simulation and automated design of silicon photonics devices funded by the NSF under a CRII grant. Silicon Photonics is an exciting emerging technology platform which leverages existing CMOS Silicon-on-Insulator foundry infrastructure to guide and manipulate light on the nanoscale. Despite having great potential, silicon photonic devices are challenging to design and simulate due to the lack of analytical solutions, small wavelengths, and large structures involved. Simulations today rely on the Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) method. Unfortunately, FDTD suffers from slow convergence, poor accuracy, long simulation times, and significant numerical dispersion. The goals of this project are to couple a fast simulation method with optimization techniques to achieve rapid automated design of silicon photonics devices. To achieve this, we propose an alternative simulation approach which is based on boundary integral equations (BIE) in the frequency-domain. Our method is dispersion-free and only requires discretization of the material interfaces which reduces the number of unknowns significantly. The method is high-order accurate, achieving close to spectral accuracy, and only requires meshing at a few points per wavelength. Our poster introduces our BIE algorithms and implementations in both two and three dimensions and demonstrates recent results using our framework to rapidly simulate silicon photonic devices with high accuracy. We also demonstrate fast automated design of new, high-performance silicon photonic devices in both 2D and 3D by applying the adjoint method for computing the gradient of the objective function used for optimization. We have fabricated several of the devices optimized via our methodology and are currently in the process of measuring them to compare against our predicted simulation results. 

https://underline.io/speakers/59501-constantine-sideris




CRII: SHF: Ultra-fast Simulation and Automated Design of Silicon Photonics Devices

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 Electronic design and design automation (EDA) is a key enabling technology in the advancement of information processing that we are enjoying today. EDA has provided fundamental design principles and tools empowering the exponential growth of the number of transistors on an integrated circuit chip over the past 50 years. Without EDA, it would not have been possible for billion-transistor chips to be a reality! 

After five decades of growth, the field of EDA now faces some unique challenges. On one hand, we are approaching the physical limit of transistor scaling, and the golden days of exponential growth in transistor density are over. The exorbitant cost of integrated circuit fabrication and the excessive complexity of EDA tools make it difficult to bring design automation innovations to practice. On the other hand, the recent rise of machine learning and artificial intelligence applications and emerging architectures and technologies calls for more customized solutions to designing electronic systems. 

## **Objectives of the Workshop:**

This workshop, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), will assemble a diverse group of leading researchers from both academia and industry to identify future research directions in design and design automation of electronic systems and architectures in response to the challenges and opportunities. It will feature plenary talks and panels as well as roundtable discussions. Collectively, the workshop attendees will explore answers to overarching questions such as 

•	what are the high-risk and high-return research topics, 

•	what other fields adjacent to EDA research should be aggressively pursued for highly interdisciplinary collaboration, and

•	where the research funding should come from and how it should be distributed to encourage more transformative research. 

The workshop will also include a satellite event with a roundtable panel discussion on strategies to improve foundry access to US-based EDA researchers. A final report, based on the deliberations of the workshop, will be produced to the government recommending future research directions.


Constantine Sideris

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CRII: SHF: Ultra-fast Simulation and Automated Design of Silicon Photonics Devices

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