Keysight Brings Radio Frequency and Photonic Design Together for Tower Semiconductor

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Keysight Technologies, Inc. has certified Advanced Design System (ADS) Photonic Designer to support Tower Semiconductor’s PH18 silicon photonics process design kits (PDKs). Engineers can now work from schematic through simulation and layout in one environment. Teams already working on high-speed digital and radio frequency (RF) projects in ADS can use Tower processes to design photonic integrated circuits (PICs) or co-design them with electronic circuits in the same tool.

As optical link rates climb to 1600G and beyond, electrical and optical interactions impacted by interdependent physics determine performance. Verification must cover the PIC and the system in which it will operate, which has meant design teams working in separate tools to transfer different data and translate models, limiting what can be simulated. Integrating electrical and optical work removes that.

Tower RF processes have run on Keysight ADS for more than a decade, with circuit design and simulation in ADS, electromagnetic analysis in RFPro, and electrothermal simulation for silicon germanium power amplifiers. Engineers can design PH18 photonic circuits in the same schematic as their high-performance electronic circuits. The PDK provides physics-based models of photonic components, which designers integrate directly into electrical-optical-electrical (EOE) simulations to predict real-world device, component, and system performance.

ADS provides design rule check (DRC) compliant photonic layout devices and designer level layout versus schematic (LVS) checks, so performance and physical issues surface before fabrication. Foundry level verification and tapeout are completed using Tower tools.

Dr. Samir Chaudhry, Vice President of Customer Design Enablement and Reliability, Tower Semiconductor, said: “The convergence of electronics and photonics for applications such as CPO and NPO is driving a new generation of high-bandwidth, low-power communication systems. By bringing Tower’s PH18 silicon photonics foundry technology into the Keysight ADS environment, we are enabling designers to model, simulate, and optimize complete electro-optical systems with greater accuracy and efficiency. This collaboration builds on our decade’s long partnership with Keysight and helps our customers shorten development cycles, reduce design iterations, and accelerate the deployment of advanced silicon photonics solutions.”

Niels Faché, Senior Vice President, Design Engineering Software, Keysight, said: “Photonic integrated circuits are becoming central to high-speed data communications, and the cost of getting the design wrong keeps rising. A general-purpose simulation gives you a plausible answer, but to get one that you can act on, the models have to be tied to the larger system of what is being fabricated. Working with Tower Semiconductor reflects our long-standing commitment to a unified workflow for electronic and photonic engineering.”