Enabling a focus in simulation and time and cost efficiencies in actual design to accelerate time-to-market

Singapore, 15 June 2020 – CompoundTek, a global foundry services leader in emerging silicon photonics (SiPh) solutions announces the company’s collaboration with Ansys to expand CompoundTek’s Photonic/electronic process design kit (PDK) to include a process file for custom design in Ansys Lumerical DEVICE Suite. Designers are now empowered to quickly augment existing CompoundTek PDKs with custom components that adhere to foundry specifications. The more efficient and reliable simulation flow based on the new process file will help CompoundTek’s customers achieve their design goals and accelerate the time-to-market of their products.

SiPh integrated circuits are becoming widespread particularly in applications related to datacom, radio frequency, and sensing. Yole’s Silicon Photonics Market and Technology 2020, shows that in 2019, shipments of SiPh transceivers for datacenters reached almost 3.5 million units, generating revenues worth approximately US$364 million as a result of the development of transceivers to penetrate the silicon photonics world for telecom/datacom applications. By 2025, this market is expected to be worth US$3.6 billion with 24 million units shipped. This has also driven the emergence of an ecosystem with PDKs, design rules, simulation software, testing equipment, and foundries.

CompoundTek PDKs are key to commercialising silicon photonics for these applications, with the Ansys partnership facilitating innovative PDK-driven methodologies such as the new process-enabled custom design flow in Ansys Lumerical DEVICE Suite. The key enabler in this flow is the Layer Builder, which generates a 3D CAD model from the design layout (typically in GDS format) and the foundry process file. The latter is now provided by CompoundTek and it contains critical technology information such as the vertical position, thickness, material and sidewall angle of each process layer.

The technology information is typically delivered in handbooks provided by foundries, but lack of a process file necessitates manual configurations of the CAD model which is both time-consuming and error-prone. By using a process file verified by CompoundTek, customers spend less time configuring the geometry of their simulation and more time focusing on the actual design and optimisation stages of their work.

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