Accelerate the Photonic IC Design with Cadence EPDA Environment

Do you believe the existing semiconductor methodologies will adequately support the ever-increasing data rate and latency?

Transistor scaling has always existed, but increasing parasitics with smaller process nodes, elevated clock speeds, and latency leads to a surge in data movement energy and latency. These costs are unacceptable for applications that depend on transferring substantial amounts of data across varied systems.

The growing need for advanced computing capabilities, rapid communication, and expansive data centers are fueling the demands for increasing data rates in communication across dies, sockets, boards, systems, and racks. As Moore’s law reaches its boundaries, advancements in materials science, chip design, and photonic technologies pave the way for high-speed, low-power communication. The convergence of semiconductors and photonics represents a paradigm shift, allowing high-bandwidth, energy-efficient devices that seamlessly merge electronic and photonic components.

This blog explores the opportunities and challenges of combining semiconductors and photonics, emphasizing their applications in crucial industries like telecommunications, data centers, bio-photonics, and environmental sensing. It will also explain how Cadence electronic/photonic design automation (EPDA) tools are setting the stage for this exciting shift, creating pathways to highly efficient photonic IC design.

Understanding Photonics

To put it simply, photonics entails working with photons instead of electrons. It encapsulates the generation, manipulation, and detection of photons. Photonic technologies promise orders-of-magnitude speed improvements with reduced power consumption for data transmission and ultrasensitive sensing capabilities in multiple domains. In industries as varied as telecommunications, manufacturing, and healthcare, photonics is already playing a critical role, and its scope only continues to expand.

The fusion of photonics and semiconductors enhances semiconductor capabilities by using the speed and precision of photons, leading to faster, more efficient electronic devices. Silicon photonics has also been explored as a solution for optical interconnects, replacing traditional copper-based interconnects in data centers and high-performance computing systems.

Fusion of Photonics and Semiconductors

The fusion of photonics and semiconductor technology is crucial in revolutionizing high-speed connectivity. The silicon photonics at the core is fueled by the ability to control light in tiny structures made from semiconductor materials. This allows for the creation of devices that are faster, more reliable, and use less energy than traditional electronic devices. Silicon photonics is an emerging technology experiencing growing demand; the global silicon photonics market size is expected to grow at a CAGR of 25.8% by 2030.

These semiconductor technology advancements are bringing photonics to the chip level with photonic integrated circuits (PICs). Unlike traditional integrated circuits (ICs), which rely on electrons, PICs modulate and detect light (photons). PICs offer a viable solution in markets with heavy bandwidth demands and other critical applications such as antenna, RF systems, bio-photonics, and environmental sensing systems. However, compared to electronic IC design, PIC design involves many challenges due to signal drift and structures like waveguides and interconnects.

Accelerating PIC Design with Cadence

PIC design involves a unique layout, error checking, and circuit modeling challenges. While electronic designers have expertise in using a traditional electronic design automation (EDA) flow, standard EDA flows are not equipped to accommodate the integration of photonics circuits and components into their electronic counterparts reliably or effectively. Their curvilinear, polygon-based layouts are typically drawn by hand, which is labor-intensive and time-consuming. Available process design kits (PDKs) are immature, with limited fixed GDS layout cells, specifications, and process rules. Error checking is challenging, yet layout versus schematic (LVS) and design rule checking (DRC) tools are primitive. Circuit modeling is also complex without the support of a widely accepted SPICE equivalent.

Often, designers manually draw schematics twice when designing systems and do the same with layouts when designing components. Cadence has teamed up with industry-leading ecosystem partners and foundries partners to address the challenges of designing PICs to develop an integrated EPDA environment.

Cadence EPDA Environment

The Cadence EPDA environment is built on the industry-standard Cadence Virtuoso Studio custom IC design platform. It supports monolithic and hybrid approaches (e.g., a 3D-IC stack with a traditional electronics chip on top of a photonic chip). The comprehensive EPDA flow provides schematic capture, circuit simulation, schematic-driven layout implementation, and 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.

The CurvyCore infrastructure, integrated into Virtuoso Studio, allows designers to create and edit complex curvilinear shapes common in photonics, MEMs, microfluidics, and conformal metal routing. Integrating the CurvyCore technology into the Virtuoso Studio platform contributes to a single design environment for developing complex multifabric systems.

Learn More

• Cadence Collaborates with GlobalFoundries to Advance Silicon Photonics IC Design
• Photonics: Integrated electronics/photonics design automation provides comprehensive design flow
• Photonics: Riding the waves along the spectrum