We are pleased to announce the Synopsys OptoCompiler™ solution for photonic integrated circuit (PIC) design, layout implementation, and verification. OptoCompiler is the industry’s first unified electronic and photonic design platform, combining mature and dedicated photonic technology with Synopsys’ industry-proven electronic design tools and methods to enable engineers to produce and verify complex PIC designs quickly and accurately. By providing schematic-driven layout and advanced photonic layout synthesis in a single platform, OptoCompiler bridges the gap between photonic experts and IC designers to make photonic design accessible, fast, and flexible.
For more information, please see the release notes on the Customer Support Portal.
OptSim and ModeSYS
In today’s ever-shrinking product development cycles, rapid technological advances often pose a challenge to the need for shorter times-to-market. To help strike a balance between technology learning curves and rapid prototyping, the following new application notes are available in version 2020.09. The application notes enhance productivity with complete design files and documentation that serve as excellent starting points to manufacturable solutions.
Increasing traffic demands have pushed boundaries of spectral efficiency by way of moving from binary intensity modulation to multi-symbol phase modulation and using both polarization of the light source. As a result, various ways of encoding information in four-dimensional (4D) constellation have emerged. PS-QPSK is one of them. PS-QPSK was thought of as a fallback option for a PM-QPSK system where in case of any fault or degradation in PM-QPSK, the system can operate as PS-QPSK at 25% less capacity
Market: Long-haul fiber-optic telecom systems
Swept frequency light source based time-of-flight (ToF) principles are used in LiDAR applications in automotive cruise control (ACC) and automotive collision avoidance systems (ACAS) as well as in swept source optical coherence tomography (SS-OCT). The application note focuses on considerations for resolution sensitivity and measurement of time of flight from the detected radio-frequency (RF) spectral tones.
Markets: Sensors, Automotive
25GBASE-SR is an IEEE Ethernet standard that provides an upgrade path from 10G/40G to 25G/100G migration in response to rapidly increasing bandwidth demand while still using cost-effective multimode fiber-based, NRZ transmission. The core idea is to use a single-lane with 25G NRZ direct modulation over OM-3 and OM-4 multimode fibers that can be scaled up with number of lanes when needed. The bandwidth-distance product can be further improved by use of Reed-Solomon Forward-Error Correction (RS FEC) coding technique.
Markets: Enterprise Data Centers and Cloud Environments
For more information, please see the release notes on the Customer Support Portal.
OptSim Circuit
The majority of elements in high-density photonic integrated circuits are linear, time-invariant passive components that can be completely described by their transfer matrix. Solving each of those models in time-domain can lead to time-consuming circuit simulation. The LTI circuit solution is a faster way of solving circuits with LTI components to obtain time-domain output.
Optical isolators help block unwanted optical signals and prevent undesired effects on photonic circuits. It is a challenge to design an isolator integrates easily with silicon and provides good isolation. Implementations using nonlinear optical elements come with undesired, power-related side effects, while some active isolator implementations haven’t successfully achieved higher degrees of isolation. In this application note, we demonstrate a design of an active isolator that uses traditional TW-MZM.
Market: Photonic Integrated Circuits
For more information, please see the release notes on the Customer Support Portal.