Latest Advancements to the Industry-Leading EPDA Design Flow for Silicon Photonics: Invited Paper

Silicon photonics has emerged from research labs and is currently being used in a range of commercial products, with significant growth expected over the next few years. Current and future applications include transceivers for datacoms in datacenters and 5G, as well as a variety of sensors from medical diagnostics to LIDAR. Even longer-term applications such as artificial intelligence and quantum information technologies are in development. This growth is supported by a wide range of foundries who offer silicon photonic processes, as well as an ecosystem of design tools. We present an innovative design flow for electronic photonic design automation (EPDA) which fully supports industrial product development. This flow combines the best-in-class tools for schematic capture, co-simulation and implementation, combined with the leading photonic solvers for custom component optimization, parameter extraction and photonic compact model development. We discuss how it combines the maturity of EDA with requirements unique to photonic design.