A New Approach for Integrated Simulation and Layout of Photonic Integrated Circuits

Modern photonic integrated circuits are typically designed using 3 or more software tools - a tool to compute the optical response of each building block, a circuit simulator to assemble these into a response for the whole circuit and a layout tool to create the manufacturing masks. This new approach brings the 3 stages together in one unifed environment, while having negligible cost increase in simulation time.