Photonic Solutions Enewsletter

Photonic Solutions from Synopsys Are Helping Enable a New Era of Moore's Law!

At SNUG World 2021, Synopsys chairman and co-chief executive Aart de Geus unveiled a portfolio of design tools that will enable a new era of Moore’s Law – called SysMoore – to achieve groundbreaking advances in computational power. Synopsys Photonic Solutions will have an important role in these advances with its unified platform to develop photonic-enabled chips more quickly for the next generation of optical communications, sensing, and bio-photonics products.

We are excited to announce an enhanced electro-photonic design platform that includes the OptSim Elite and Photonic Device Compiler tools to accelerate the development of photonic ICs (PICs). Both OptSim Elite and Photonic Device Compiler work seamlessly with the OptoCompiler design cockpit.

OptSim Elite

OptSim Elite is an OptoCompiler-interoperable simulator which, in addition to OptSim Circuit’s PIC capabilities, provides electro-optic co-simulation with Synopsys HSPICE and PrimeSim (FineSim) electrical circuit simulators, and adds single- and multimode fiber-optic system modeling capabilities within the simulation and analysis environment.

Photonic Device Compiler

Photonic Device Compiler provides a wide range of physical simulation methods in a single tool. The software can automatically add device simulation results to a custom device library, process design kit (PDK), or IP library. Custom devices can be used in Synopsys’ PIC software solutions for schematic capture, circuit-level simulation, layout, and verification.

If you’re interested in learning more about how OptoCompiler, OptSim Elite and Photonic Device Compiler can help speed PIC development, contact us with your questions and we'll be happy to get you started.

New Technical Paper: Are Electrical Circuit Languages Robust Enough for Photonics?

Traditionally, chip designers for fiber-optic systems using electronic design automation (EDA) tools frequently needed a way to model photonic components in the same design environment with the electronics. Examples include modeling lasers or modulators with their electrical driver circuits, or modeling transimpedance amplifier (TIA) and receiver electronics with the photodetector. These designs focused primarily on optimizing electronics. Since the electronic component count is usually several orders higher than the photonic component count, it was typically sufficient to model a few photonic components through electrically equivalent circuit representations using SPICE or Verilog-A. It is no surprise that when photonic integrated circuits (PICs) picked up rmomentum, early electro-optical co-design approaches continued. However, the question needs to be asked: Is this the right approach to model photonics in PICs?

Download the paper