A survey on design and synthesis techniques for photonic integrated circuits

摘要

In recent years, silicon photonics (Si-photonics) have received significant attention among researchers due to complementary metal-oxide semiconductor compatibility, and the characteristics of high-speed and low-power dissipation. The integration of electronic and optical circuits on a single chip has opened up new directions of research in the domain of digital logic design and synthesis of photonic integrated circuits (PICs). Several optical switching devices using different technologies have been designed and experimentally demonstrated, which further helps in implementing PICs. In order to efficiently design larger, complex and reliable PICs, the photonic design automation techniques are being explored as electronic design automation techniques have been investigated in case of very large-scale integration circuits. This paper presents an extensive survey of recent work reported in the literature on the domains of logic circuit design, synthesis, and physical design automation for implementing PICs. The aim of this survey is to start with the fundamental optical concepts and then move to the latest research domains of design and synthesis of PICs. Finally, we provide a discussion on the challenges and the future research directions toward practically realizing the Si-photonics and PICs.