Rigorous Analysis and Design of Nano-Photonic Devices using a Novel Hardware Approach

A nearly universal trend in modern technology is integrating systems, and their associated devices, on decreasingly smaller scales. Examples range from complete telecommunication systems on a chip to implantable medical devices smaller than human cells.The majority of these devices apply hybrid designs that integrate on a commensurate scale electronics with active and passive optical components. How to design such systems accounting for all the various physical phenomena, including those present in thefabrication processes, is a very challenging problem. Moreover, as optical components are reduced to a scale that is comparable to the operational wavelength, approximate optical design tools are no longer valid. For these cases more rigorouselectromagnetic analysis is required. Thus, new computer aided design (CAD) tools are needed that integrate the rigorous physical models and fabrication processes into a single desktop environment. To solve this very challenging problem we propose toapply EM Photonic's revolutionary hardware acceleration system. This system has demonstrated that application specific hardware can provide unprecedented acceleration in solving complicated electromagnetic problems using only a single desktop computer.We are confident this novel approach will break the computational bottleneck that has hindered progress towards a truly useful micro- and nano- photonics CAD system. Anticipated Benefits: If successful our novel hardware approach could revolutionize theway optical engineering analyze and design micro- and nano- scale photonic devices. Moreover, since the algorithms we are proposing are rigorous in nature this same approach can be applied to applications in the microwave, millimeter wave or other EMregimes that require a complete full-wave solution.