An Accessible High-Performance Application for Nanophotonics Design and Optimization

The next generation of photonics projects will require the ability to design ever larger devices, and yet not even the present-day devices can be modeled as needed by the innovators, and therefore designed using computation. Modeling capability exists, but it is not cost-competitive due to the amount of computing time needed and the lack of computing facilities by the many small companies who are the innovators in this space. Thus, the industry continues to develop new large devices using the prototype and try method, which is very expensive. Tech-X will address this problem by developing a software application for high-performance, device-based computing of these devices. This software will be faster than existing solutions by an order of magnitude through both advanced computing methods and advanced algorithms, which will be employed to will minimize the time for finding optimal configurations. The application will be general, capable of simulating dispersive media, and it will be user friendly, with easy geometrical setup, and easily defined strategies for optimization, through an intuitive cross-platform Graphical User Interface. The solution will be available on the Cloud, which will make it affordable for and accessible to the many small businesses in this space. In Phase I Tech-X prototyped a new dispersive dielectric algorithm implementation making use of computed devices and optimized it. Tech-X prototyped a new algorithm for computing derivatives of figures of merit with respect to shape changes. Tech-X demonstrated how this would be set up in an intuitive graphical user interface. Tech-X will develop an application for rapid design and optimization of photonic devices. This application will provide a full toolbox – geometry setup, advanced and fast computations, optimization, and more. It will run on a variety of off-host computing devices (GPUs) including those from both NVidia and AMD. It will additionally offer distributed memory parallelism and be available in the cloud. Tech-X will reach out to the photonics industry for expert advice and software evaluation continuously as it develops the commercial product. The proposed software will be available to multiple researchers in the national laboratories and universities performing research on photonic devices as well as be available to industrial concerns involved in the manufacture of such devices. Commercial applications high-performance computation, communication, and sensors.