Siemens Digital in GloFo photonics PDK

Both Caliber instruments are GF-certified, so mutual customers designing for the new GF Fotonix platform can continue to use the trusted Caliber nmPlatform for Silicon Photon Devices as they used for previous offerings.

“While silicon photon designs and their subsequent inclusion in multi-matrix proposals introduce new testing difficulties, these complexities are addressed in Caliber’s silicon photonics design kits, which do not require a change in the way designers traditionally use Caliber,” he said. Michael Buhler-Garcia from Siemens. .

Silicone photonic devices contain curved layouts, not the linear features of the Manhattan Network found in traditional CMOS designs.

Applying traditional CMOS DRCs to silicon photon layouts leads to numerous false-positive errors that design teams often have to spend weeks tracking.

To meet this challenge, GloFo uses Siemens Caliber eqDRC software, which allows rule checks to use equations instead of or in addition to linear measurements.

This helps for more accurate results, resulting in significantly fewer errors, so design teams can spend much less time and less resources to debug their projects.

Similarly, the curvilinear nature of photonic structures, together with the general lack of lists of sources of optical networks, poses a challenge in performing LVS verification.

Traditional IC LVS technology extracts physical measurements from well-understood electronic structures and compares them with the corresponding elements in the source network list.

However, with curved structures, it is difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish where one structure begins and another ends.

With the new GloFo Fotonix PDK with Caliber LVS, this hurdle is solved by using text and marker layers to identify regions of interest.

Silicon photon devices are often embedded in a separate matrix of a specific process node, and then arranged and packaged with the other design components in multiple matrices, using advanced heterogeneous packaging technologies.