CrystalWave

What is CrystalWave?

Our complete photonic crystal design suite

CrystalWave is a powerful CAD environment for the layout, design and optimisation of integrated optics components, which has been optimised for the modelling of photonic crystals structures (2D and 3D lattices).

CrystalWave includes a layout editor dedicated to the design of photonic crystal structures and it is packed with a number of high-performance simulation engines, making it the most comprehensive tool for modelling of photonic crystals. CrystalWave will allow you to design and model a large variety of photonic crystal structures, including arbitrary photonic crystal waveguides, photonic crystal cavities and photonic crystal lasers.

All your photonic-crystal modelling needs in one package

CrystalWave features a very user-friendly Layout Editor specialised for photonic crystals, which will allow you to design a lattice and introduce defects in just a few clicks.

To model light propagation in your structures, CrystalWave supports a unique combination of Maxwell Solvers:

• our FDTD Engine : a state-of-the-art 2D/3D Finite Difference Time Domain engine, probably the most popular propagation algorithm for photonics and photonic crystals.

• our FETD Engine : our unique 2D/3D Finite Element Time Domain tool, ideal for modelling plasmonics accurately.

• our FEFD Engine : a high-speed 2D Finite Element Frequency Domain, ideal for fast prototyping and optimisation.

• our RCWA Engine : an innovative implementation of the Rigorous Coupled-Wave Analysis method for the modelling of periodic structures, metamaterials and diffractive optical elements.

It also features a fast and user-friendly Band Structure Analyser relying on plane-wave expansion (PWE), allowing you to calculate band diagrams and band surfaces (equifrequency curves) in 2D and 3D structures.

Our market leading automatic optimisation tool Kallistos is available to drive each of the simulation engines. It is particularly powerful when associated with the FEFD engine – together these two tools will reduce design times to a fraction of what is currently possible, making the design of complex PBG circuits a practical reality for all. You can find an example of photonic crystal optimisation here.

CrystalWave is available as a native 32-bit and 64-bit application. The 64-bit version of CrystalWave allows you to include large amounts of memory in your FDTD, FETD and FEFD calculations. In combination with the multi-core capability of the FDTD and FETD engines, this enables CrystalWave to simulate large devices at very high speed!

In addition, CrystalWave includes a GDS-II mask file generator carefully optimised for planar photonic crystal structures.

For the modelling of photonic structures which are not photonic crystals, please see OmniSim. For the modelling of photonic crystal fibers please see FIMMWAVE.

Platforms

PC min spec: Win 8/10 x64, 4GB RAM, Intel Haswell, AMD Ryzen2 or later CPU.
UNIX / Linux: Clustered version available on UNIX / Linux systems.