Modeling and simulation of large scale, high-density photonic integrated circuits.

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Photonics as an enabling technologies has been deployed in a wide range of applications from broadband communications, high-speed interconnects, remote sensing and massive-parallel signal processing etc. While discrete photonic components are still the main-stream technologies for building complex photonic and optoelectronic systems, integrated photonic circuits started to emerge as more advanced technology platform for high-end applications such as high-data-rate coherent fiber optic communications. The next frontier in photonics will be definitely high-speed optical interconnects for computers and consumer electronics. For such applications, large-scale and high-density photonic integration based on silicon or other materials will be required. With the recent progress in fabrication technologies, high-performance and application-specific photonic circuits have been developed and demonstrated. To further reduce the cost of development, powerful computer aided design methodology and software tools are required for performance simulation and design optimization of such systems. So far, most of the analytical and numerical modeling and simulation techniques such as the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method is not scalable to the physical size and/or topology complexity of the large-scale, high-density photonic integrated circuits. In this research, I propose to investigate and develop a hierarchical approach based on recently discovered theoretical model, i.e., the complex modes. The research will focus on silicon photonics as the technology platform and develop a universal modeling framework that can be scaled and applied to photonic integrated circuits of arbitrary physical size and topology complexity. Further, we plan to utilize the emerging cloud-computing technologies to further accelerate and empower the simulation engine so that the overall simulation tools will be at least 100 times more efficient than the conventional numerical approach. The research, if successful, will fill in an important gap in development and engineering of future photonic integrated circuits for different applications.