Lumerical’s 2013b Release a Milestone in Modeling Sophisticated Photonic Components and Circuits Lumerical’s 2013b release contains targeted feature development to better address a wide array of sophisticated passive, nonlinear and active photonic components on their own and assembled within highly functional and complex photonic integrated circuits May 23, 2013 – Vancouver, BC – Lumerical Solutions, Inc., a global provider of photonic design software, announced today its 2013b release which provides significant improvements to all of Lumerical’s products, and includes releases of FDTD Solutions 8.6, MODE Solutions 6.5, INTERCONNECT 3.0 and DEVICE 3.0. This 2013b release will reinforce Lumerical’s status as the most frequently referenced vendor of dedicated photonic design tools by R&D professionals. Release Highlights: Passive and Active Photonic Component Design DEVICE 3.0 introduces true 3D electrical simulation and visualization with an advanced finite element drift-diffusion solver. Enhancements to performance, including support for multi-core CPUs, now allow engineers to rapidly create, simulate, and analyze virtual prototypes of active optoelectronic devices. MODE Solutions 6.5 introduces nonlinear and active material modeling to waveguide based components. These developments will benefit a wide range of designers, for example: CMOS image sensor pixel designers will benefit from complete 3D component simulation, and can accurately calculate performance metrics including dark current, quantum efficiency, spectral cross-talk as well as the transient response under switched illumination. High-speed modulator designers can now model the charge injected into complex geometries, and import those results into MODE Solutions 6.5 as a function of applied voltage to calculate insertion loss, modulation depth and 3dB modulation bandwidth. Waveguide component designers interested in waveguide nonlinearities, amplification and the response of such systems to applied transients can now use the Flexible Material Plugins previously released in FDTD Solutions within MODE Solutions 6.5. “We are designing and processing Si integrated photonic components for circuits which need to function within larger scale systems,” according to Bruno Rauber, Senior Staff Engineer at STMicroelectronics. “We use Lumerical’s products to fine tune our silicon process, design highly optimized components, perform accurate parameter extraction, and to construct compact models that can be used for photonic circuit verification within EDA style design flows. We look forward to our ongoing collaboration with Lumerical to ensure their products can support our future design efforts.” Release Highlights: Photonic Integrated Circuit Design INTERCONNECT 3.0 includes: The ability to import an optical SPICE netlist and create a corresponding PIC schematic, facilitating the analysis of optical circuit representations within third-party EDA tools including Mentor Graphics’ Pyxis. File transfer that supports Agilent Advanced Design System and Mentor Graphics Eldo time domain waveform formats. Enhanced support for the development of process design kits (PDKs) with the inclusion of an extensive library of customizable compact models and lookup tables containing design intent parameters. An expanded element library, including a ring modulator element for the fast and accurate simulation of cascaded rings and elements to better simulate the electrical portion of mixed-signal circuits.