Invited paper: Bridging EDA and silicon photonics design: enabling robust-by-design photonic integrated circuits

Ghanaatian, Zahra, authorMirza, Asif, authorShafiee, Amin, authorPasricha, Sudeep, authorNikdast, Mahdi, authorACM, publisher2025-03-132025-03-132025-03-04Zahra Ghanaatian, Asif Mirza, Amin Shafiee, Sudeep Pasricha, and Mahdi Nikdast. 2025. Invited paper: Bridging EDA and Silicon Photonics Design: Enabling Robust-by-Design Photonic Integrated Circuits. In 30th Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference (ASPDAC 25), January 20 23, 2025, Tokyo, Japan. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 7 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3658617.3703151https://hdl.handle.net/10217/240176Silicon photonic devices are essential components of integrated optical communication systems and emerging photonic processors. However, their performance is notably impacted by fabrication-process variations (FPVs), which primarily stem from optical lithography imperfections. The impact of FPVs can accumulate and deteriorate the system-level performance through, for example, increasing system power consumption, accumulated crosstalk noise, and degrading signal integrity in photonic systems. In this paper, we discuss the promise of variation-aware design-space exploration and optimization to enhance photonic device robustness under different FPVs while considering two silicon photonic devices used widely in different applications, namely Microring Resonators (MRRs) and Mach-Zehnder Interferometers (MZIs). In addition, we consider a system-level case study of an MZI-based coherent neural network, where we show how our proposed variation-aware design optimization at the device level helps improve the network accuracy by up to 88% under FPVs.born digitalarticleseng©Zahra Ghanaatian, et al. ACM 2025. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in ASPDAC '25, https://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3658617.3703151.silicon photonicsfabrication-process variationsmicroring resonatorsMach Zehnder interferometersdesign explorationdesign automation and optimizationInvited paper: Bridging EDA and silicon photonics design: enabling robust-by-design photonic integrated circuitsBridging EDA and silicon photonics design: enabling robust-by-design photonic integrated circuitsTexthttps://doi.org/10.1145/3658617.3703151