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Ansys Lumerical FDTD
Simulation of Photonic Components

Ansys Lumerical FDTD is the gold-standard for modeling nanophotonic devices, processes, and materials. The integrated design environment provides scripting capability, advanced post-processing, and optimization routines.

ANSYS LUMERICAL FDTD

Industry’s Leading Choice for Versatile and Scalable Photonic Design

Ansys Lumerical FDTD enables advanced photonic design, integrating FDTD, RCWA, and STACK solvers in a single design environment. This empowers precise analysis and optimization for a wide range of devices including gratings, multi-layered stacks, microLEDs, image sensors, and metalenses, delivering best-in-class performance across diverse applications. Ansys Lumerical FDTD empowers rapid virtual prototyping and verification of thousands of iterations for the most complex designs.

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    Choice of Optimal Method: FDTD, RCWA or STACK
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    Multiphysics and Multi-scale workflows
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    Scalable and Accessible HPC and Cloud Solutions
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    Foundry Compatible & Customized Design
ansys lumerical fdtd

Quick Specs

Ansys Lumerical FDTD works seamlessly with Ansys Lumerical CML Compiler, Ansys Multiphysics solvers, Ansys Speos, Ansys Zemax, and third-party electronic-photonic design automation (EPDA) vendors to enable fast, accurate, scalable photonic design. Leverage best-in-class solver on HPC (CPU and GPU) and Cloud to excel in tackling the largest challenges swiftly and efficiently.

  • Unparalleled Performance and Accuracy with FDTD Solver
  • Rapid Analysis of Periodic Structures with RCWA Solver
  • Rapid Analysis of Multi-layer Thin Films
  • Scale and Accelerate on HPC and Cloud
  • Multiscale and Multiphysics Workflows
  • Automation API (Lumerical scripting language, Python and MATLAB)
  • Particle Swarm and Inverse Design Optimization
  • Foundry Compatible Automated Layer Builder
  • Automated S-parameter Extraction

JANUARY 2024

What's New

The 2024 R1 release enables new FDTD and RCWA solvers capabilities, especially for advanced analysis of metalenses, GPU-accelerated FDTD simulations, and cluster scalability.

2024 R1 Lumerical
New Metalens Simulation and Design Enhancements
  • New multi-incidence angle and amplitude data are now stored along polarization and phase from Lumerical in a fast and memory-efficient mapping file
  • Compatibility with OpticStudio for enhanced MTF, PSF analysis, new phase slope map, and phase slope controlling operands
  • New multi-lense/metalens simulations
  • Large scale metalens design
2024 R1 Lumerical
New Capabilities for GPU FDTD and Shared Web Licensing
  • Fast GPU acceleration of FDTD simulations on single-node with multi-GPU vRAM scalability
  • Shared web licensing
2024 R1 Lumerical
New Scalable Cluster Solution based on Slurm Scheduler
  • New Python routines for easy interaction with a Slurm scheduler on- premise/cloud cluster
  • Greater control over the whole process, from job submission to data analysis using Python, starting with a template
RCWA
New RCWA Solver Improvements
  • New grating power results for cleaner and simpler analysis 
  • New support for materials with in-plane anisotropy

CAPABILITIES

Versatile and Scalable Photonic Design Powered by Lumerical FDTD

Lumerical FDTD is industry’s leading simulation software for design and optimization of a wide range of photonic components. Lumerical FDTD is remarkably versatile and scalable, offering unmatched speed and the ability to harness HPC (CPU and GPU) and Cloud resources.

 

Key Features

  • FDTD – 3D Electromagnetic Solver
  • RCWA – Rigorous Coupled Wave Analysis
  • STACK – Optical Multilayer Solver
  • Photonic Inverse Design Optimization
  • Scale and Accelerate with HPC and Cloud

From capturing the electric and magnetic field distributions to transmission and reflection, and evaluation of power in each grating order, RCWA provides fast simulations of complex multilayer stacks with surface patterning.

It is ideal for rapid prototyping for thin film applications. From capturing microcavity effects and interference to handling dipole illumination and plane wave functions, STACK provides quick simulations of complex thin film multilayer stacks.

Automatically discover optimal designs and geometries for a targeted design goal.  Discover non-intuitive geometries that optimize performance, minimize area, and improve manufacturability.

Powerful post-processing capability, including far-field projection, band structure analysis, bidirectional scattering distribution function (BSDF) generation, Q-factor analysis, and charge generation rate.

Simulate devices fabricated with nonlinear materials or materials with spatially varying anisotropy. Choose from a wide range of nonlinear, negative index, and gain models. Define new material models with flexible material plug-ins.

Uses multi-coefficient models for accurate material modeling over large wavelengths ranges. Automatically generate models from sample data or define the functions yourself.

FDTD’s CAD environment and parameterizable simulation objects allow for rapid model iterations for 2D and 3D models.

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Rockley Photonics

Rockley conducted multiple 2D and 3D single time-domain simulations using Lumerical software on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) thus allowing for the extraction of high-resolution spectra.

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Xanadu

Xanadu builds X8 quantum computing chip with unprecedented low-loss performance while significantly accelerating their design schedule.

Ligentec

LIGENTEC Leveraged Ansys Lumerical Photonic Inverse Design for a Compact Waveguide Crossing Design

LIGENTEC used Photonic Inverse Design (PID) capabilities in Ansys Lumerical FDTD for the design and optimization of its waveguide crossing.

White Papers

View More

Diffraction

Maximizing Design Flexibility for Multi-layered and Diffractive Optical Components

Learn how the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD), rigorous coupled-wave analysis (RCWA), and STACK solvers in Ansys Lumerical FDTD can be used to simulate nanostructured, multilayered optical components. 

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Designing for Success: A Solver Combination Strategy for Photonic Integrated Components

This white paper discusses approaches for addressing photonic integrated circuit (PIC) component simulation challenges with a combination of optical solvers. 

Application Gallery

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Application

Photonic Inverse Design Grating Coupler (3D)

In this example, we use the Inverse Design Toolbox (lumopt) to optimize a 3D SOI grating coupler.

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Application

Polarization-sensitive plasmonic reflectors for HUD – Speos Interoperability

or a HUD that needs to reflect polarized lights, here we demonstrate periodic plasmonic nanostructures that could provide significant reflection for certain polarization.

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Application

Micro-LED

In this example, we use the STACK optical solver and FDTD to characterize a cylindrical micro-LED and extract the emitted power and radiation pattern.

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FDTD Product Reference Manual

The FDTD reference manual provides detailed descriptions of product features.

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RCWA Product Reference Manual

The RCWA reference manual provides detailed product descriptions of product features. 

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STACK Product Reference Manual

The STACK reference manual provides detailed descriptions of product features.

Ansys software is accessible

It's vital to Ansys that all users, including those with disabilities, can access our products. As such, we endeavor to follow accessibility requirements based on the US Access Board (Section 508), Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), and the current format of the Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT).

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