Electromagnetic-Based Computer Aided Design (CAD) for Wavelength Scale Optics

A nearly universal trend in modern technology is the continued integration of systems, and their associated devices, on decreasingly smaller scales. While this has led to personal computers that offer more functionality and faster computational speeds, ithas also spurred the development of hybrid optoelectronic systems on a chip (SOCs). Currently, such SOCs are receiving significant interest from the booming telecommunications industry for applications such as all optical switching, wavelength divisionmultiplexing, and optical add-drop filters. In each of these applications active and passive optical devices are being integrated with electronic devices on the chip scale. Consequently, modern applications are forcing the development of passive opticalcomponents whose size is reduced to a scale that is comparable to their operational wavelength. As a result the plethora of analysis and design methods that were once applicable to passive optical element design are no longer valid. For this reason a newsuite of computer tools need to be developed and is therefore the focus of the proposed effort.For this reason, we were awarded a Phase I project to develop such a tool. The tool we developed was based on the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method. For the last several years, we have developed working versions of the FDTD method forapplication to two-dimensional, three-dimensional, and axially symmetric active and passive optical elements. In the Phase I effort we refined these methods for their application to diffractive optical modeling and developed a GUI based CAD tool. Inaddition we also conceived of a hardware assisted implementation of the FDTD that allows the DOE CAD tool to be applied to DOEs of realistic size in a reasonable amount of computation time.In the Phase II effort we will continue our development of the hardware implementation of the FDTD method and expand its application to two- and three-dimensions. In addition, the CAD tool will be expanded to include the ability to analyze and designadditional photonic elements such as photonic bandgap devices and micro-cavity resonators.