Keysight delivers Electrical-Optical-Electrical workflow with VPI Optical Link

Keysight Technologies announced a new simulation workflow capability that seamlessly connects PathWave Advanced Design System (ADS) with VPI Design Suite from VPIphotonics, enabling designers to predict the signal integrity of Electrical-Optical-Electrical data links.

Keysight’s new VPI Optical Link solution in PathWave ADS simulates and optimizes design parameters concurrently in electrical and optical domains eliminating key barriers to developing high performance hardware products. It can predict the data link BER (Bit Error Rate) and understand how electrical design choices will interplay with optical design choices to deliver a reliable system design.

Keysights said the defining technology advancement in this new solution is the electro-optical workflow which can process millions of bits in minutes for accurate BER prediction. As a result of this rapid simulation, system architects can investigate link performance characteristics with varied fiber lengths, effects of distortion/dispersion, optical drive level, electrical transmitter and receiver equalization settings, as well as electrical channel design including trace routing and the design of PCB vias.

“We’re excited to partner with VPIphotonics to provide an industry-leading solution to the market. It seamlessly combines both of our companies’ simulation domain expertise to provide a powerful and comprehensive solution to a real customer challenge,” said Tom Lillig, general manager of the PathWave Software and Solution team at Keysight Technologies.

“Engineers have a wide variety of constraints when developing optical interconnect solutions for intra and inter datacenter applications,” stated André Richter, general manager of VPIphotonics. “With this new seamless design flow linking simulations of the electronic circuits at the transceivers with simulations of the optical fiber link, we are proud to jointly deliver a unique solution that offers the investigation and optimization of overall system performance.”

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VPIphotonics, LIGENTEC, and VLC Photonics collaborate on PICs

VPIphotonics, LIGENTEC, and VLC Photonics announced a design process collaboration for SiN Photonic Integrated Circuits.

VPIphotonics provides simulation software addressing demands in integrated photonics and fiber optics, optical transmission links and networks.

LIGENTEC is a foundry service manufacturing Photonic Integrated Circuits for customers in high-tech areas such as integrated quantum optics, LiDAR, sensors and microwave photonics.

VLC Photonics is a fabless and independent photonic design house, which provides photonic integration solutions and services. It has a wide experience in multiple material platforms (silicon photonics, indium phosphide, silicon nitride, PLC) and on the design and test of optical components and systems.

With this collaboration, designers that use LIGENTEC All-Nitride (AN) technology will now benefit from a workflow that starts from a graphical photonic integrated circuit design and system simulation environment, which seamlessly couples to layout design tools for scripted layout design and DRC capabilities. The new workflow is based on LIGENTEC and VLC Photonics verified reference designs with the simulation software by VPIphotonics using verified measurements of fabricated chips. This workflow is enabled by the new VPItoolkit PDK LIGENTEC – a pluggable toolkit extension to VPIcomponentMaker Photonic Circuits by adding the support of the 800 nm Silicon Nitride process “AN800” offered by LIGENTEC for dedicated shuttle runs and Multi-Project Wafer (MPW) runs.

https://www.vpiphotonics.com

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VPIphotonics and Luceda Photonics streamline PIC design

VPIphotonics, which offers simulation software for photonic design automation, has teamed up with Luceda Photonics to streamline the design process for Indium Phosphide-based Photonic Integrated Circuits (PICs).

Luceda’s IPKISS design platform combines circuit level design and simulation, layout and device CAD all based on Python scripting. Luceda’s SMART Photonics PDK allows designers to tape-out to the SMART Photonics foundry by means of a foundry validated PDK.

VPIcomponentMaker Photonic Circuits is a professional simulation and design environment for large-scale photonic integrated circuits and offers a large mix of general-purpose photonic, electrical and optoelectronic device models. The library extension VPItoolkit PDK SMART v1.5 enables a layout-aware schematic-driven PIC design workflow and provides access to a broad set of available standard building blocks of the SMART PDK.

The companies said the solution enables the designer to combine the best of both worlds by porting a schematic design to the Python-based layout.

“The IPKISS design platform supports a growing number of PDKs from the major photonic IC foundries in silicon, dielectric and III-V technology. By making our validated SMART Photonics PDK available from within  VPIcomponentMaker Photonic Circuits, organizations can now take a leap forward and create a design flow that is more reliable and scalable and that will enable them to consolidate their knowledge in a fast moving industry,” stated Pieter Dumon, CTO of Luceda Photonics.

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VPIphotonics updates Design Suite for coherent M-QAM and PAM-M

VPIphotonics announced the latest release of its VPIphotonics Design Suite for optical components and transmission systems.

Version 9.9 comes with enhancements of the user interface and tools operation, as well as advances in simulation capabilities, such as new design and analysis tools for coherent M-QAM and direct-detection PAM-M systems, new and enhanced DSP and coding functionalities, extended library of PIC elements and instrumentations, to continuously support VPIphotonics’ existing and addressing new applications and markets.

The company said its simulation tool suite provides access to over 850 ready-to-run demonstrations, including new ones
such as probabilistic shaping, PAM-4 for interconnects, multimode VCSEL transmission, nonlinear Volterra filtering.

VPIphotonics Design Suite Version 9.9 is on show at OFC 2018, booth 4513.

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VPIphotonics and Fraunhofer HHI showcase DSP algorithms for coherent optical

Berlin-based VPIphotonics, which is a provider of photonic design automation solutions for components, systems and networks, has collaborated with the Fraunhofer Heinrich-Hertz-Institute (HHI) to develop Digital Signal Processing (DSP) algorithms for coherent optical transmission systems.

The new version 3.0 of the VPItoolkit DSP Library is now available as a pluggable toolkit for the company's VPItransmissionMaker Optical Systems, which is a simulation platform for optical transmission systems addressing applications from short-reach to ultra-long-haul. This can be used by developers to simulate arbitrary 2D, 4D and even N dimensional modulation formats, and bit stream en-/decoding using soft and hard decision FEC codes.

The new release of the VPItoolkit DSP Library is also available as pluggable toolkit to the company's VPIlabExpert product, which delivers a set of interface modules for automatic signal conversion and transfer between simulation software and lab equipment.

VPIphotonics said the new version of its VPItoolkit DSP Library, along with its simulation and analysis tools, can significantly accelerate and improve the R&D process as it enables a diversity of important transmitter and receiver-side DSP functions for coherent optical systems. Key functionality includes, but is not limited to, non-linear pre-distortion, I/Q imbalance correction, blind CD estimation and compensation, data-aided channel equalization, clock recovery and deskew, carrier frequency and phase recovery, polarization demultiplexing and PMD compensation.

The new version also introduces a 4x4 multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) adaptive equalizer that can perform additional compensation of I/Q imbalance and skew in received signals.

VPIphotonics is demonstrating its VPItoolkit DSP Library Version 3.0 at this week's ECOC 2017 in Gothenburg, Sweden (booth 334).

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VPIphotonics Upgrades its Photonic Simulation and Analysis Tools

VPIphotonics, a provider of photonic design automation solutions for components, systems and networks, has announced the release of VPIphotonics Design Suite Version 9.8, a simulation and analysis environment for optical components and transmission systems.

The latest release of VPIphotonics Design Suite supports four application-specific simulation tools - VPIcomponentMakerPhotonic Circuits, VPIcomponentMakerFiber Optics, VPItransmissionMaker Optical Systems and VPIlabExpert, and offers enhancements to the user interface and tools operation to help streamline the design and analysis processes. In addition, improved simulation capabilities enhance support for research and product development for new technologies, components and systems.

Target applications for VPIphotonics Design Suite span integrated photonics and optoelectronics, fibre-based lasers and amplifiers and low-cost high-speed direct detection and high-capacity flexible digital coherent systems.

Key new capabilities featured in version 9.8 include:

1. Data-sheet model for directly modulated lasers driven by multilevel data signals as used in PAM applications.

2. Added functionality for synchronising received and reference sequences for DSP and performance estimation.

3. Enhanced multimode fibre module to support coupling between different mode groups.

4. Improved doped multimode fibre solver to support cross-sections spectra of 2-level rare-earth dopant ions, besides Erbium ions, plus analysis tool for multimode amplifiers to characterise gain, noise, mode-resolved signal and noise powers, OSNRs and BERs.

5. Bidirectional electro-optic amplitude and phase modulator allowing control of the electro-absorption and -refraction effects in waveguides.

6. Enhanced modelling of curved waveguides with arbitrary shapes and a new library of waveguides with frequently used curvature shapes.

7. M x N arrayed waveguide grating model using the scattering matrix approach based on datasheet or measured data.

VPIphotonics' noted that Design Suite also incorporates over 850 demonstrations to show the functionality and application range, with new demonstrations for applications such as coded modulation, Stokes vector modulation, PAM, PON transceiver characterisation, 5G wireless backhaul over fibre, DBR fibre lasers and electrooptic components.

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