photonflux 0.1.0

Photonic circuit network simulator

gdsfactory 6.36.1

Photonflux is a photonic circuit simulation tool for simple, extensible simulation of large active photonic systems.

It solves the problem that existing simulation tools are unable to capture many important phenomena that are key to creating working products including:

• Complex active component models
• Component variation and Monte-Carlo simulation
• Thermal crosstalk between components
• Fabry-Perot reflections from on-chip components

Here, we build a circuit simulator on NetworkX, a complex network solver, to enable arbitrarily reconfigurable circuit models and systems. As opposed to other approaches, circuits / schematics are defined using a netlist generated from a layout. The primary reason for this is that photon designers typically do not use a idea -> schematic -> layout -> fabrication flow, but often skip the schematic step entirely (idea -> layout -> fabrication). The reason for this is that layouts in photonics are expressive and contain far more detail about the operation of systems than a schematic would capture.

Layouts for simulation in photonflux are defined in a yaml markup format that can be automatically generated using .

As an example of the need photonflux is meeting, consider an array of MZI switches in silicon photonics using thermal phase shifters.

For a working product there are several things I would want to debug

• Is thermal crosstalk between components

Installation

Installation for new photonflux users

It's as simple as:

python -m pip install photonflux --upgrade

Installation for developers

First install the package from github.

Then, navigate to the download directory and install as an editable python package

python -m pip install -e .

Getting started

We include several examples in the examples folder, but if your usecase is not there please create an github issue and we can work together on it.

Acks

Contributors (in chronological order):

• Alex Sludds (MIT): Initial code and documentation.