Inverse designed scalable integrated photonics

Photonic inverse design – a departure from a traditional photonics design approach, can lead to optimal photonics designs that are much better than state of the art in many metrics (smaller, more efficient, more robust). In fabrication-constrained inverse design, the full parameter space of fabricable three-dimensional photonic devices is searched, using a variety of optimization algorithms combined with high-speed electromagnetic solvers implemented on GPUs. While we first pioneered this approach around 15 years ago, the most recent iteration of our inverse design software developed by Spins Photonics Inc. (a spin off company from our research group) enables fast fabrication constrained optimization of large footprint devices, bringing us new device functionalities. In particular, we illustrate this with recent demonstrations of powerful integrated photonic systems for application such as optical interconnects, with error-free and fast chip-to-chip and on-chip optical interconnects compatible with fabrication in commercial foundries. Moreover, the approach is material agnostic and fully compatible with photonic materials beyond silicon.