Use-case in achieving 20x Smaller Footprint with 2-Week Design Cycle

Singapore, 11 December 2019 – Facing increased time-to-market demands in a commercialising photonics industry, Lumerical and CompoundTek worked together to explore new ways to improve one of the most complex photonic components, the SiPh grating coupler. In addition to creating solutions that shorten the design cycle, the companies emphasised minimising component size – therefore reducing costs to the end-user.

Lumerical’s Photonic Inverse Design (PID) flow was used to design and optimise the new grating couplers in conjunction with its industry-leading FDTD nanophotonic simulator. Designers were able to rapidly develop optimised functionality with improved performance, reduced footprint, and achieve more robust manufacturability. The PID flow, run on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC2 platform, takes advantage of the flexibility, cost-effectiveness, and virtually unlimited scalability the system offers.

New SiPh grating couplers were developed with a footprint 20x smaller than CompoundTek’s existing coupler and with predicted improvements in performance. After two weeks, optimal designs for eight manufacturable variants were made available to CompoundTek that are significantly smaller than currently available designs and with better performance across the entire band, with significant gains in the o-band.

Read about the partnership between CompoundTek and Lumerical, announced here

Read more about this use-case and how a 20x Smaller Footprint with 2-Week Design Cycle was achieved in the attachment below: