New Design Method in Silicon Photonics With ANSYS

Lumerical – Brief Introduction of Inverse Design

Chih Hao Chen

Application Engineer
ANSYS / Lumerical
Outline

• Introduction to silicon photonics

• Photonic inverse design
• Robust designs
• Topology optimization
• Conclusion

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 Introduction to silicon
photonics

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 Silicon photonics

X. Wang: https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/ubctheses/24/items/1.0165738

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 Building blocks beyond waveguides
Waveguide coupling/splitting Fiber-waveguide coupling Electrical phase control Thermal phase control

Photodetector
Ring resonators
Si

Ge
SiO2

10 um
X. Wang: https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/ubctheses/24/items/1.0165738

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 Photonics is everywhere, and growing!

Optical transceivers, active

optical cables, next-gen Consumer electronics,
processors, AI/machine smart phone sensors, IoT
learning and quantum home sensors, displays, …
computing, …

Medical imaging, sensing

and diagnostics, lab on a
chip, …

Industrial IoT, industrial

chemical &
environmental sensing, …

Optical communications,
analog & RF systems, 5G,
structural & environmental
sensors, autonomous
vehicle navigation (LIDAR),
…

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Motivation

• Photonic integrated circuits (PICs) are becoming increasingly complex

Photonic artificial neural network

Integrated LIDAR

MIT and DARPA Pack Lidar Sensor Onto Single Chip

Y. Shen et al. Deep learning with coherent nanophotonic circuits, https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/semiconductors/optoelectronics/mit-lidar-on-a-chip
Nature Photonics, https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2017.93 Image: Christopher V. Poulton

• Manufacturing imperfections are a challenge

• Design software can be used to increase yield for a given process by
‐ Enabling statistical simulation of circuits and systems to create circuit designs that maximize yield
‐ Creating robust component designs that function across known process variations

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 Photonic inverse design

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Traditional Forward Design

• Traditional design often guided by physical insight

• Might use parameter sweeps or optimization in a small (e.g. 2-5) number of parameters
• Has produced a large library of template devices over the past decades
• But: Time-consuming and often difficult to generalize (e.g. to broad-band devices)

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Photonic Inverse Design
Automatically
adjust parameters
? F = |0.5*Pi – Po|
? ??
Adjoint Method

no
IL = 0.3dB
FDTD Is F
NANOPHOTONIC minimal
MAXWELL’S
Parametrize Design and SOLVER yet? yes
specify FOM
Computes F and 𝛁𝑭

• Target any figure of merit (FOM)

• Allow physical insight (or an existing design) to seed the process
• Efficient optimizers allow a large number of design parameters
‐ gradient based algorithms with the adjoint method to efficiently compute ∇F

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Gradient based optimization

• FOM evaluation is expensive

• Gradient methods are efficient
• The gradient is required

𝜕FOM 𝜕FOM
∇𝑝 FOM = ,⋯,
𝜕𝑝1 𝜕𝑝𝑁

• Danger of local minima

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 The adjoint method for gradient evaluation

• Allows for efficient evaluation of FOM and its gradient

• Only two simulations (independent of the number of parameters) are required:

Forward Simulation Adjoint Simulation

Forward Adjoint

Source Monitor Monitor Source

For more details on PID, see review articles (and references therein):
“Topology optimization for nano‐photonics”, Jensen, J. and Sigmund, O. Laser & Photon. Rev. 5, 308-321. (2011)
“Inverse design in nanophotonics”, Molesky, S. et al., Nat. Photon. 12, 659–670 (2018)

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The adjoint method for gradient evaluation

• We use an approach based on Green’s

functions in the Born approximation
• Requires no change to the FDTD solver
• Started as a collaboration with Optics Express, Vol 21, Issue 18, 2013
https://www.osapublishing.org/oe/abstract.cfm?uri=oe-21-18-21693
Christopher Keraly from Eli
Yablonovitch’s group (UCB)
• Open-source project called lumopt
‐ Hosted on github under a MIT license at
https://github.com/chriskeraly/lumopt

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 Shape vs Topology parameterization
• Shape • Topology

? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
? ?
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
? ? ? ? ? ? ?
? ? ? ? ? ? ?
? ? ? ? ? ? ?
? ? ? ? ? ? ?
? ? ? ? ? ? ?

☺ Allows to quickly optimize existing designs ☺ User only specifies footprint and materials
☺ Manufacturing constraints can be built into ☺ Often yields very high-performance designs
parametrization
 Manufacturing constraints more difficult to enforce
 Requires good initial design
 Design often unintuitive and not easy to generalize
 Parametrization may still be too restrictive

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Y-splitter example

FOM = 0.5 = ideal

Fast 2D followed by full 3D

‐ This examples takes < 60 minutes to run

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 Robust designs

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Robust designs

• Build a splitter tolerant to manufacturing error

‐ Co-optimize 2 different shapes (same parameters)
‐ “Over etch” slightly smaller than nominal
‐ “Under etch” slightly larger than nominal
‐ Same FOM function Over etch Under etch

TE TE
TE TE

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Co-optimization for a robust splitter

• Co-optimization of +/- 14nm

• Setup 2 optimizations
• FOM = FOM1+FOM2
• 4 FDTD simulations/FOM/iteration

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Measured results

FDTD – Nominal

FDTD – Shrunk by 2.5% (11nm)

Designed and fabricated during the

"SiEPIC-Passives workshop with Applied Nanotools fabrication“,
Organized by Lukas Chrostowski at UBC (siepic.ubc.ca)

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 Shape-optimized devices fabricated and tested by CompoundTek
• Polarization: Y-branch TE-mode O-band Grating Coupler
• TE
• TM
• Operation wavelength:
• O-band
• C- band
Peak insertion loss
decreased by ~1dB
• Optimization Techniques:
fabrication and verification
• Shape
Grating coupler
• Topology
Footprint reduction by ~20x
• Cloud Platform: • Optimization over 50 design parameters
• Amazon Web Services EC2 with • Minimal feature constraints
FDTD Burst Pack licenses • Total time ~ 2 weeks
• Approximate cost ~USD$250 with spot pricing

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 Topology optimization

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Topology optimization

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Topology optimization

• Each grid point can have a permittivity

between material A and B
• To avoid greyscale
‐ Binarization stages
• To avoid checkerboards ?
‐ Smoothing filter with user chosen radius
‐ “lithography-friendly”
• To avoid further small features
‐ Minimum feature size constraint (DFM)
‐ Does not require additional simulations
‐ Adds a simple constraint/penalty to the optimization
‐ Zhou, M. et al. "Minimum length scale in topology optimization by geometric
constraints“,
Comput. Methods in Appl. Mech. Eng 293, 266-282 (2015)

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 Topology Optimization Workflow

Initialization Phase 1 - Greyscale Phase 2 – Binarization Phase 3 – DFM

You specify an The optimizer is free to add The optimizer forces the The minimum feature size in
optimization volume and or remove material with material index to values at the design is constrained
initial material index any index between an the upper and lower bound based on the target
distribution. upper and lower bound. A to create a structure that photolithography process.
Arbitrary material index smoothing filter removes can be defined by etch. Small features are eliminated
values can be applied. sharp features.

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Example: 4-Channel Wavelength Demultiplexer in the O-band

• Topology optimization
𝟏𝟐𝟔𝟓𝐧𝐦 − 𝟏𝟐𝟕𝟓𝐧𝐦

• Best known theoretical proposals have

a footprint of over 1mm2 𝟏𝟐𝟖𝟓𝐧𝐦 − 𝟏𝟐𝟗𝟓𝐧𝐦

• We aim for 36μm2

𝐿𝑦 = 6μm
• A reduction of around 5 × 104 ! 𝟏𝟑𝟎𝟓𝐧𝐦 − 𝟏𝟑𝟏𝟓𝐧𝐦

𝟏𝟑𝟐𝟓𝐧𝐦 − 𝟏𝟑𝟑𝟓𝐧𝐦

𝐿𝑥 = 6μm

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4-Channel Wavelength Demultiplexer in the O-band

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With constraints (DFM stage with 150nm min feature size)

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Field distribution

𝜆 = 1270nm 𝜆 = 1290nm 𝜆 = 1310nm 𝜆 = 1330nm

• Real part of Hz
• Color scale identical for all wavelengths
• No extreme hotspots

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3D O-C band splitter, 150nm minimum feature size constraint

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 3D 4-Channel Wavelength Demultiplexer in the O-band

No minimum
feature size

Greyscale phase Binarization phase DFM phase

DFM (150nm
minimum
feature size)

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 Conclusion

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Conclusions

• Manufacturing imperfections are a challenge in photonics

• In addition to other strategies
‐ Individual components should be made both robust and high-performance using inverse design
methods to increase yields

• The team
‐ Jens Niegemann, Roberto Armenta, Adam Reid, Dylan McGuire, Milad Mahpeykar, Ian Zwiers and
Taylor Robertson

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