The Advent of EDA for Photonic Design

At DesignCon 2000, Ahmed Nawaz, Lucent Vice-President of Integrated Circuits, Microelectronics Group, gave a perspective of the insatiable demand for communication system and network bandwidth and the solution opportunity that optical components and systems offer. A paper was presented in the technical sessions on "Photonic Design Automation" by Arthur Lowery Virtual Photonics Inc. The paper was co-authored by a number of Virtual Photonics colleagues. A design case demonstration with Virtual Photonics' suite of EDA tools took place in the exhibition area of DesignCon 2000.

In Ahmed Nawaz's keynote message, he suggested that the communications revolution offers the opportunity to meet the following demands:

Every 5 minutes the sending of 5 million messages via the Internet

Every hour 500 million voice transmissions

Every 24 hours 50,000 new users join the 24 million worldwide users of services

Every week 630 new lines are installed

Every 100 days Internet traffic doubles

He noted that optical transmission offers the opportunity to meet the capacity demand described. Optical networks have the capacity to transmit all television channels concurrently.

The cost of transporting a bit over optical networks is declining by one-half every nine months. Mr. Nawaz called this the "Law of Photonics." Optical technology is producing economies twice as fast as silicon technology, or Moore's Law rate of improvement.

Virtual Photonics is seizing the opportunity to provide a tools suite to advance photonic design from "back of the napkin" design with manual calculations to design-automation-assisted component, system, and network design. To help the designer make intelligent choices, they have developed the "Photonic Network Design Suite" (PNDS), which is linked to their physical-layer simulator, "Photonic Transmission Design Suite" (PTDS). The shared data storage facility and the tools operate on a common platform. Whereas PTDS covers the physical aspects, PNDS spans the transport and service layer. Furthermore, there are costing modules to investigate both the network and operations cost at the different layers.

The authors of the paper on "Photonic Design Automation" present the case for co-simulation of networks with complex sub-systems and devices using examples of analog and digital, photonic device, system and network design. In that systems and networks cost billions of dollars to develop and install, the time is right to provide automation assistance to help designers make optimum design choices.

Lucent Technologies has years of experience in photonic component, system, and network development. They lead in serving this market. However, other companies, including start-ups, have entered the market as well.

With the fast ramp up in optical design activity, Virtual Photonics is likely to be joined in the marketplace by other companies that are developing products to advance photonic EDA technology.

URL References

www.lucent-optical.com
www.virtualphotonics.com

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