Topic Archive
Photonics
Computational optics, waveguides, and photonic device engineering.
Showing 7 articles tagged Photonics.
Automated "Inverse" Design of Grating Couplers for Co-Packaged Optics
How we design grating couplers for co-packaged optics with shape optimization and adjoint gradients, with a worked dual-layer example and measured dual-layer couplers from an OFC 2026 paper we co-authored with TSMC.
Using decision models to speed up design rule violation repair in chip design
AI agents can fix design rule violations on chips, but the process is slow. We used a decision model to choose fixes for design rule check (DRC) violations on a digital and a photonic benchmark, and kept nearly all the quality of a large language model at under half its cost.
We built a layout viewer for AI agents. Then an agent scaled it to 38 million shapes.
How a goal-driven loop turned PhotonForge's browser LiveViewer from a half-million-shape viewer into a 38-million-shape, 60 FPS tool for humans and agents.
Learning Auto-Routing by Building: From Brute Force to an Auto-Design Agent
How I learned auto-routing for photonic chips — a failed brute-force attempt, AI as a learning partner, interactive HTML arenas, a PhotonForge router, and an agent that iterates 27 designs in under three minutes.
Predicting Peak Memory for an Electromagnetic Mode Solver
How we replaced a heuristic memory estimate with a calibrated model for Tidy3D mode solver workloads, eliminating under-predictions across the calibration set.
Can AI Agents Autonomously Design Components on Photonic Chips?
We gave AI agents a photonic simulator, a DRC engine, and four design challenges. They autonomously designed waveguide bends, crossings, splitters, and demultiplexers — some reaching near-perfect performance.
Designing a Photonic Chip Component with ~45 Lines of Python
A compact introduction to photonic inverse design with Tidy3D, using a pre-built simulation and a ~45-line optimization loop.