Streamlining Silicon Photonics Design Verification

Keysight Technologies has released a new Process Design Kit (PDK) for its Advanced Design System Photonic Designer that supports the GlobalFoundries (GF) silicon photonics process. This integration enables engineers to simulate photonic integrated circuits and verify full electro-optical-electrical system performance for applications in data centers, artificial intelligence infrastructure, and optical communications.

Consolidating the Electro-Optical-Electrical Design Workflow
Designing a photonic integrated circuit (PIC) represents only one phase of optical component development; engineers must also verify the circuit's performance within a broader electro-optical-electrical (EOE) system. Historically, design teams have utilized separate platforms for PIC layout and system simulation, requiring frequent data transfers between isolated tools. This fragmentation introduces validation delays late in the development cycle. By integrating the GF silicon photonics process into a unified environment, the updated process design kit allows engineers to validate entire optical link behaviors without switching toolsets, creating a streamlined optical data ecosystem for hardware engineering.

Signal Integrity Validation and Measurement Correlation
High-speed optical transceivers and co-packaged optics require stringent signal integrity verification. The software integration provides access to physical models specifically calibrated for the GF foundry process, ensuring that software simulations accurately reflect the physical parameters of the manufactured chip. Within this environment, engineers execute eye diagram analyses and calculate Transmission Dispersion Eye Closure Quaternary (TDECQ) metrics. Furthermore, the inclusion of FlexDCA oscilloscope software enables direct correlation between predictive simulations and physical hardware measurements, reducing test variables before manufacturing.

Accelerating Development Through Pre-Calibrated Modeling
Utilizing a shift-left engineering approach, development teams can evaluate how specific PIC layouts impact overall optical link performance during the initial architecture phase. Because the physics-based models are pre-calibrated to the foundry's manufacturing parameters, developers bypass the need to construct component libraries from scratch. This early system-level insight minimizes the volume of necessary design iterations, ensures compliance with targeted transmission standards prior to tape-out, and accelerates the availability of components for optical communication infrastructure.

Additional Context
This section details technical specifications and competitive benchmarking not included in the original news release.

The silicon photonics Electronic Design Automation (EDA) market includes several integrated platforms that compete based on physical modeling accuracy, foundry partnerships, and electro-optic co-simulation capabilities. Synopsys offers OptoCompiler and OptSim, which provide unified schematic-driven layout and system simulation, frequently benchmarked alongside foundry-specific PDKs. Ansys Lumerical represents another standard for device-level photonic simulation, typically integrated with Cadence Virtuoso to achieve electro-optical co-simulation. Keysight’s primary differentiator in this ecosystem is the native integration of hardware measurement algorithms—specifically the FlexDCA instrument software—directly into the simulation environment. While platforms like Cadence and Synopsys focus heavily on integrated circuit layout and multiphysics routing, the Advanced Design System specifically targets high-frequency signal integrity validation and simulation-to-measurement correlation for optical transceivers using industry-standard TDECQ compliance testing.

Edited by Aishwarya Mambet, Induportals Editor, with AI assistance.

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