Electronic Photonic Design Automation

Photonic circuits manipulate light instead of electrical signals, introducing fundamentally different design requirements. Unlike electronic circuits, photonic components are sensitive to wavelength, phase, and geometry, and are often implemented as waveguides, resonators, and other optical structures. This makes the design process more complex, requiring specialized tools beyond those used in traditional EDA.

EPDA tools extend EDA workflows to support photonic-specific constraints and behaviors, enabling full-system design flows that include both photonics and electronics. They are used by chip designers, researchers, and foundries to build and verify integrated photonic systems.

In early photonics research, circuit design was mostly manual. Layouts were often drawn by hand, with limited simulation or verification tools. The rise of silicon photonics in the 2000s triggered demand for scalable design automation, leading to the adaptation of EDA principles to photonic domains. Several commercial and academic tools emerged, and standardization efforts began to support interoperability across the design ecosystem.

EPDA environments typically provide toolchains analogous to those used in electronic IC design. The following components form the backbone of a typical photonic design flow:

Photonic circuits are typically modeled and simulated in the frequency or time domain using tools like Luceda Caphe Luceda Photonics. Caphe Photonic Circuit Simulator. https://academy.lucedaphotonics.com/ipkiss/guides/caphe/ and Lumerical INTERCONNECT.Lumerical Solutions. INTERCONNECT Overview. https://www.lumerical.com These tools allow designers to validate circuit behavior before layout.

Physical design of PICs involves the placement of waveguides and components using photonic-aware layout tools. Examples include IPKISSIPKISS Photonic Design Platform. https://www.lucedaphotonics.com/ipkiss and KLayout with SiEPIC plugins.SiEPIC-Tools for KLayout. https://github.com/SiEPIC/SiEPIC-Tools These tools support design-rule-compliant layouts in foundry-compatible formats like GDSII.

Verification includes:

• Design Rule Checking (DRC): Ensures waveguide spacing, bend radius, and other geometry-based rules are met.
• Layout versus Schematic (LVS): Validates that the physical layout matches the intended schematic structure.
• Parameter extraction: May include optical loss, effective index, or group delay.

EPDA workflows depend on foundry-provided PDKs that define validated building blocks like modulators, detectors, and splitters. PDKs also contain process-specific data such as layer stacks, optical models, and layout templates.IPKISS Photonic Design Platform. https://www.lucedaphotonics.com/ipkiss

PICs often integrate with electronic drivers, amplifiers, and controllers. Co-design features in EPDA include:

• Floorplanning for combined photonic-electronic chips
• Mixed-signal simulation (e.g., Verilog-A + photonic models)
• Export of netlists into SPICE or hardware description environmentsLuceda Photonics. Caphe Photonic Circuit Simulator. https://www.lucedaphotonics.com

To ensure compatibility between tools and streamline the design-to-fabrication process, standardization is increasingly important.

Foundries play a key role by releasing standardized PDKs for specific process technologies. These PDKs define layout cells, simulation models, and performance specifications, enabling third-party tools to function reliably across the ecosystem.

openEPDA™ is a public collection of open standards for EPDA, developed by TU/e and the Photonic Integration Technology Center (PITC).openEPDA Standards Overview. https://openepda.org It defines:

• Data formats for schematic and layout interchange
• Analytic expression formats for component behavior
• PDK building blocks (uPDK)
• Layout and measurement data formats (CDF, MDF)

The openEPDA initiative also provides a Python-based reference toolkit (openepda)openepda Python package on PyPI. https://pypi.org/project/openepda/ that validates and parses these formats, supporting improved tool interoperability and design reproducibility.

EPDA tools are used in the development of photonic systems such as:

• Optical transceivers for cloud computing and telecommunications
• Quantum photonic circuits
• On-chip biosensors and lab-on-chip devices
• Photonic neural networks and AI accelerators
• LIDAR systems for autonomous vehicles

EPDA continues to evolve to meet increasing demands. Current challenges include:

• Lack of fully standardized data models across vendors
• Scalability for large, hierarchical photonic circuits
• Accurate modeling of 3D and nonlinear effects
• Seamless integration with electronic IC design flows

Emerging trends include the use of high-level photonic description languages, AI-assisted optimization, and tighter coupling between simulation and manufacturing feedback.

• Electronic design automation
• System on a chip

• [https://www.lucedaphotonics.com Luceda Photonics]
• [https://www.synopsys.com/photonic Synopsys Photonic Design]
• [https://github.com/SiEPIC/SiEPIC-Tools SiEPIC Tools on GitHub]
• [https://openepda.org openEPDA initiative]

Category:Programming tools

Category:Electronic design automation software