The power of circuit simulations for designing photonic integrated circuits

摘要

The emerging of circuit-level simulators for photonic integrated circuits (PICs) is driven by recent developmentsrnin technologies for integration of large-scale monolithic PICs in both, silicon and InP technologies.rnFor that reason, powerful circuit-level simulators should be capable to model on the same circuit differentrntypes of sub-components performing photonic, electronic or opto-electronic, active or passive functions.rnIn comparison with device-level simulations, the use of realistic circuit-level abstracted models facilitatesrnrapid functional design without going into technological fabrication details and subsequent design flow. Thisrnaccelerates the design process and decreases the number of runs to achieve the desired results. Detailedrnphysical modeling remains limited to the design of some specific individual sub-elements. Large-scale PICsrnmight comprise several thousands of elements. The circuit-level abstraction also ensures that the simulationrnspeed to achieve a certain simulation accuracy decreases reasonably slowly with the total number of photonicrncomponents in the modeled PIC. In this work, we present our solution for modeling PICs in the frameworkrnof the circuit-level simulation tool VPIcomponentMaker™Photonic Circuits (Carnotstr. 6, 10587, Berlin,rnGermany, www.VPIphotonics.com). We demonstrate the combination of different simulation approaches inrntime domain, frequency domain and time-and-frequency domain for fast and accurate simulations. We discussrnseveral diverse modeling benefits by means of application examples on silicon photonic PICs.