Optical devices are used in increasingly complex applications today—ranging from data centers to autonomous vehicles. In many cases, desirable optical properties require manipulating light at wavelength scale. To integrate individual components and circuits into larger systems, designers must be able to work effectively at both nano and macro scales.
Nanoscale structures on the surface of light-emitting diodes (LEDs), for example, have been shown to enhance their efficiency. These photonic crystals have a refractive index that changes periodically on the scale of the wavelength of light. To model an array of these LEDs, a designer needs to be able to perform highly accurate simulations at the nanoscale while also being able to scale up to simulate many devices quickly and efficiently.
Design high-precision optical systems
In 2021, Ansys acquired Zemax, whose OpticStudio software is widely used to analyze, optimize, and tolerance high-precision optical systems. While OpticStudio is designed to model the interaction of light with structures that are much larger than the wavelength of light, Ansys offers a comprehensive platform to enable users to work at different scales—from nano to system level.
In addition to OpticStudio, this platform includes Ansys Lumerical, which is used to conduct highly accurate simulations of how light interacts with wavelength-scale structures by solving Maxwell’s equations, and Ansys Speos, which enables system-level visualization, validation, and rendering.
Speos can account for human visual acuity and perception as a part of its simulation capabilities, which is critical for applications such as automotive headlights and augmented reality (AR)/virtual reality (VR) headsets. This allows engineers to design optical systems with a full understanding of how they will be perceived by the human eye, which reduces the number of expensive physical prototypes that must be built before the system can be brought to market.
This platform is designed to take you from the nanoscale all the way up to the system level of design and modeling, and there is ongoing work to connect these solutions seamlessly through easy-to-use interfaces. Design engineers are empowered with the multiphysics, multiscale simulation needed to develop modern optical and optically enabled products.
Enabling photonic integrated circuits with optical design tools
Photonic integrated circuits (PICs) will transform the way we compute and transmit information. Compared to electronic circuits, PICs offer superior scalability and efficiency—but they are an emerging technology, and novel computational tools must be developed to reach their potential.
PICs will be critical for next-generation data centers. The rise of artificial intelligence (AI), 5G, and high-performance computing is creating rapidly increasing data requirements, which in turn requires exponentially increasing power. In today’s data centers, information is transferred between fiber-optic cables and electronic chips using copper interconnects. As bandwidth requirements increase, these copper links require too much energy and photonic/optical interconnects are the necessary solution to this problem.
Pluggable optics are available and viewed by many as the near-term answer to improving data center performance and reducing data center energy consumption. By integrating electronic and photonic components onto a single substrate, co-packaged optics (CPO) can increase bandwidth density and reduce power consumption. Ansys already has electronic and semiconductor tools in its portfolio, but is working to more tightly integrate these tools with photonic simulation solutions to enable engineers to efficiently and effectively design CPO-based systems.
Read more: https://www.laserfocusworld.com/software-accessories/article/14305770/optical-design-software-from-nano-to-system-scale
