PICWave

Design Kits for PICWave

A design kit is a library of calibrated models of well-characterised building blocks (BBs) offered by an industrial fab, enabling designers to construct circuits from building blocks for their specific application, and simulate and test their designs before submitting them to the fab for manufacture.  

Each BB model in a design kit is calibrated from measurements, so that the software will simulate the correct optical performance of any circuit constructed using those same BBs. The design kit and software also enforce any design rules required by the fab. The large (one-off) investment required to create the design kit and the burden of checking that all the design rules have been obeyed are thus removed from the circuit designer, thereby significantly reducing the costs and expertise required for PIC design.

PICWave’s building block system enables design kit libraries of pre-made components (BBs) to be imported and used to construct circuits. We currently supply InP-based design kit libraries for Smart Photonics and FhG Heinrich Hertz Institut fabs under the JEPPIX platform. We expect to produce design kits for IMEC (SOI) and others in future.  

   
 
Using a design kit in PICWave: example shows 4x4 fast optical switch design.