CAREER: Automated Synthesis of Electromagnetic Devices for Nanophotonic and Radio Frequency Applications

对新技术（如即将推出的5G蜂窝标准和下一代计算）不断提高的性能和效率需求，将需要对电子硬件设计进行变革，一直到电磁学水平。通过计算机辅助设计技术，在电路，特别是数字逻辑电路的自动化和优化方面已经取得了重大进展。事实上，数字合成技术的出现，或者说计算机对数字电路的自动化设计，已经把以前认为不可能实现的硬件变成了现实，例如具有数十亿个晶体管的微处理器，它们占据了几平方厘米的形状因子，每秒能够执行数十亿次数学运算。目前，系统的底层电路组件与电磁（EM）块分开设计，通常由不同的工程师甚至完全不同的机构设计。不幸的是，大多数EM设备，如天线，微波设备，甚至光子集成电路中的纳米光子设备，必须由人类工程师从头开始精心设计。这个过程不仅繁琐和耗时，而且是次优的，并且由于设计这种设备的巨大自由度，通常会留下显着的性能增益，这是人类不可能探索的。该项目旨在通过为EM器件开发一个自动化合成平台来解决这些问题，该平台在精神上类似于数字逻辑合成，这将节省人类工程师手动设计这些器件所花费的大量时间，并产生新颖的非直观结构。这将是第一个通用的综合平台，可以处理广泛的一类设备在整个电磁频谱。这项研究将由一个教育计划，其中包括一个新的研究生班的发展，培训研究生和本科生在多学科领域，并激励K-12学生追求的职业生涯在STEM.解析解麦克斯韦方程组，其中描述了所有的EM设备，不存在除了简单的玩具问题。这显著地使新EM设备的设计复杂化，并且需要启发式方法和许多耗时的手动参数扫描。尽管具有前所未有的性能和时间节省的潜力，但目前还不存在可以以适度计算能力运行的通用EM设备的自动合成框架。该项目将通过开发一种脚本语言来描述光学和射频领域的任意EM设备，推进基于边界积分方程的高速EM仿真方法，以减少几个数量级所需的计算时间和内存，以及利用能够在很少或没有人为干预的情况下实现新设备的自动优化算法。该项目的长期目标是使即使是只有中等计算能力的非专家，如桌面工作站，也能在几分钟到几小时内快速有效地设计出多种类型的不同电磁设备。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The ever-increasing performance and efficiency demands on new technologies, such as the upcoming 5G cellular standard and next-generation computing, will necessitate a transformative approach towards electronic hardware design all the way down to the electromagnetics level. Significant progress has been made towards the automation and optimization of circuits, especially digital logic circuits, via computer-aided design techniques. In fact, the advent of digital synthesis, or the automated design of digital circuits by computers, has brought hardware into reality which was previously thought impossible, such as microprocessors with billions of transistors occupying form-factors of a few square-cm and capable of performing billions of mathematical operations per second. Presently, the underlying circuit components of a system are designed separately from the electromagnetic (EM) blocks, often by different engineers or even different institutions altogether. Unfortunately, most EM devices such as antennas, microwave devices, and even nanophotonic devices in photonic integrated circuits must be painstakingly designed manually from the ground up by a human engineer. This process is not only tedious and time-consuming, but also suboptimal and often leaves significant performance gains on the table due to the enormous degrees of freedom available for designing such devices which are impossible for a human to explore. This project aims to tackle these issues by developing an automated synthesis platform for EM devices, analogous in spirit to digital logic synthesis, which will save human engineers significant time spent designing these devices manually and lead to novel, non-intuitive structures. This will be the first generalized synthesis platform which can handle a wide class of devices across the EM spectrum. This research will be complemented by an educational plan which includes the development of a new graduate class, training graduate and undergraduate students in multi-disciplinary fields, and motivating K-12 students to pursue careers in STEM.Analytical solutions for Maxwell's equations, which describe all EM devices, do not exist except for simple toy problems. This significantly complicates the design of new EM devices and requires heuristic approaches and many time-consuming manual parameter sweeps. Despite the potential for unprecedented performance and time savings, there does not presently exist an automated synthesis framework for general EM devices which can operate with modest computing power. This project will lead to the design of such an automated EM synthesis platform by developing a scripting language to describe arbitrary EM devices in both the optical and radio-frequency regimes, advancing high-speed EM simulation methods based on boundary integral equations to decrease compute time and memory required by several orders of magnitude, and leveraging automated optimization algorithms capable of realizing new devices with little to no human intervention. The long-term goal of the project is to enable even the nonexpert with only modest computing capability, such as a desktop workstation, to design many types of different electromagnetic devices rapidly and efficiently in a matter of minutes to hours.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.