The Role of Photon Design in Photonics Research
Photon Design's powerful simulation tools continue to support cutting-edge research and innovation in photonics. In a recent publication by the University of Maryland, researchers utilized FIMMPROP—Photon Design’s software for simulating photonic waveguides and devices—to create a 2x2 Multi-Mode Interference (MMI) device with a subwavelength grating (SWG). Their results demonstrated excellent agreement between experimental findings and FIMMPROP’s simulations, showcasing the software's accuracy and reliability.
Author Xiheng Ai shared his experience with building the SWG MMI, highlighting the challenges of manually modeling such a complex structure:
“The subwavelength grating MMI we investigated has hundreds of sections. These sections are not periodic, so each section has to be modeled individually. It is nearly impossible to build and optimize the design manually. So, we use the MATLAB script to command FIMMWAVE, enabling it to draw the model for us. The commands are discussed in the FIMMWAVE manual for both MATLAB and Python. For each of our optimization iterations, the new model can be built within 1 minute.”
This approach allowed the team to efficiently optimize their design with minimal effort, leveraging FIMMWAVE and FIMMPROP to handle the complexity of the task.
You can find Xiheng Ai and the group's full published work here.
Photon Design’s tools continue to empower researchers in fields such as photonics, allowing them to explore and optimize advanced optical designs with speed and precision.