Turnkey Meshing for HPC Design and Optimization Platform for Microelectronic Components

There is a fundamental need for a high-performance computing approach to computational electromagnetics modeling tools suitable for designing and optimizing high-end radio frequency, optical, and photonics devices. Complex geometries and material responses to incident electromagnetic fields require a significant level of computational resources, especially when realistic manufacturing tolerances are incorporated into the overall design process to ensure good as-fabricated performance. Photonics, semiconductor, and telecommunications manufacturers will greatly benefit from a high performance computing design-for-manufacturing electromagnetic simulation platform capable of optimizing geometries while fully accounting for tolerances. This work will develop a high performance computing platform incorporating finite-difference time- domain algorithms capable of designing, simulating, and optimizing the types of devices needed to support new photonics and nanostructure device concepts. The platform will be designed for massively parallel operation across a large number of distributed nodes with GPU-enabled speed optimization. The Phase II effort successfully developed and validated an HPC supported FDTD simulation software package, named GECkO. The resulting software includes the physics and simulation elements necessary for design of a wide variety of RF and optical devices. It also includes a complete suite of post- processing and visualization tools necessary to interpret simulation results. The software and associated tools were developed into a complete commercial software package. The current material properties dithering approach in GECkO will be replaced by an unstructured non- orthogonal mesh supplied by Coreform’s Cubit software. The HPC algorithms will be updated to allow distribution of the various grid partitions across multiple computational nodes. This software update will significantly improve GECkO’s simulation accuracy and speed. They will also provide a common platform GECkO and IERUS’s other CEM tool, V-Lox, opening the possibility of selling a combined CEM simulation suite to customers. A planned pilot deployment will provide early customer feedback and help facilitate full commercialization of the software. This design platform will be of immediate use to telecommunications innovators and to photonics and RF device design-for-manufacturing companies. It will also enable IERUS to be a design partner to commercial partners operating in these industries. The platform will be an enabling technology for developing the next generation components required to facilitate the continued Internet of Things and optical communication growth and will greatly enhance electromagnetic simulation capabilities for a wide spectrum of customers.