Proven design platform for electronic/photonic system design, simulation, and analysis
Key Benefits
Photonics has quickly moved into mainstream electronic designs. In markets with heavy bandwidth demands, only photonic ICs (PICs) offer a viable solution. Other key applications include antenna and RF systems, bio-photonics, and environmental sensing systems.
Built upon the Cadence® Virtuoso® custom design platform, the EPDA environment supports monolithic (single chip with both electronic and photonic components) and hybrid (3D-IC stacks with a traditional electronics IC on top of a photonics IC) approaches. The comprehensive EPDA flow provides schematic capture, circuit simulation, and schematic-driven layout implementation as well as support for complex photonic SKILL® PCells and advanced photonic layout generators. It also provides co-design of the electronic and photonic components for hybrid systems.
PIC design comes with many unique challenges. Their curvilinear, polygon-based layouts are typically drawn by hand, which is labor intensive, error prone, and time consuming. Currently available process design kits (PDKs) are fairly immature, with a limited amount of fixed GDS layout cells, specifications, and process rules. Error checking is quite challenging, yet layout versus schematic (LVS) and design rule checking (DRC) tools are primitive at best.
