CRII: SHF: Ultra-fast Simulation and Automated Design of Silicon Photonics Devices

集成电路是当今大多数现代技术的主要来源。尽管到目前为止，电子电路已经足够推动技术进步，但21世纪具有挑战性的计算、能源效率和通信需求需要一个全新的范式。这可以在硅光子学中找到，这是一种新兴的技术，它允许通过将光学设备与电路集成在同一芯片上来操纵光。在芯片上控制光的能力已经带来了重要的技术进步，包括超高速有线和无线通信、无透镜成像、光检测和测距(LiDAR)、无移动部件的陀螺仪、气体传感器和无标签生物传感器。该项目旨在解决目前严重限制硅光子学潜力的器件模拟和设计困难，引入具有前所未有的性能和设计复杂性的新一代芯片，并为片上光学计算和超高速、高效的通信铺平道路。利用数学和计算建模，这项研究将吸引和培训从数学到计算机工程和应用物理的多学科领域的研究生和本科生。另一个目标是吸引对STEM感兴趣的当地学校的高中生，特别关注妇女和代表性不足的群体。该项目将促进强大的硅光子学新设计工具的发展，这将使人类设计师能够最大限度地在系统级而不是在器件级进行设计，从而使他们能够开发高度复杂的系统。由于其尺寸大、功能小和复杂性，光子器件的数值模拟非常困难，而且缺乏解析甚至近似的解决方案使新器件的设计进一步复杂化。该项目将发展基于边界积分方程法的先进数值技术，并将其应用于光子器件模型。与目前需要模拟设备的体积网格的方法不同，该项目的方法只需要对设备的表面或边界进行网格划分，从而显著减少了问题的大小，并显著提高了速度、CPU和内存效率。高次多项式函数将被用来近似电磁未知数，从而导致关于网格大小的几乎指数收敛到精确解的速度，而目前的方法只能实现线性或二次收敛。将设计和实施一个优化框架，它将能够自动设计新的、随时可以制造的光子器件，而不需要任何人为干预，而不是指定所需的功能和性能。新的模拟和优化平台的有效性将通过利用该框架设计和评估实际的硅光子器件，如波长分路器、功率分路器和光栅耦合器。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Integrated circuits are responsible for most of modern technology today. While electronic circuits have been sufficient for advancing technology until this point, the challenging computational, energy-efficiency, and communication demands of the 21st century require a radically new paradigm. This can be found in silicon photonics, an emerging technology which allows the manipulation of light by integrating optical devices on the same chips as electrical circuits. The ability to control light on a chip has already led to important technological advancements, including ultra-high-speed wired and wireless communications, lens-free imaging, Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR), gyroscopes without moving parts, gas sensors, and label-free biosensors. This project seeks to solve device simulation and design difficulties which currently severely limit the potential of silicon photonics, ushering in a new generation of chips with unprecedented levels of performance and design complexity, and paving the way for on-chip optical computation and ultra-fast, efficient communication. Leveraging mathematical and computational modeling, this research will engage and train graduate and undergraduate students in multi-disciplinary fields spanning from mathematics to computer engineering and applied physics. Another objective is to engage high school students from local schools interested in STEM, with a specific focus on women and underrepresented groups. This project will spur the growth of powerful new design tools for silicon photonics which will allow human designers to maximize their efforts designing at the system level, rather than at the device level, allowing them to develop highly intricate systems.Due to their large size, small features, and complexity, photonic devices are very challenging to numerically simulate, and the lack of analytical or even approximate solutions further complicates the design of new devices. Advanced numerical techniques based on boundary integral equation methods will be developed in this project and applied to model photonic devices. Unlike present approaches which necessitate volumetric meshing of devices to be simulated, the project's approach only requires meshing the surfaces or boundaries of devices, leading to a significant reduction of problem size and dramatic increases in speed and CPU and memory efficiency. High-order polynomial functions will be used to approximate the electromagnetic unknowns, leading to an almost exponential rate of convergence to the exact solution with respect to the mesh size, in contrast to present methods which can only achieve linear or quadratic convergence. An optimization framework will be designed and implemented which will be capable of automatically designing new, ready-to-fabricate photonic devices without any human intervention other than specification of desired functionality and performance. The efficacy of the new simulation and optimization platform will then be demonstrated by utilizing the framework to design and evaluate real silicon photonic devices such as wavelength demultiplexers, power splitters, and grating couplers.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.