The course is postponed from 10-14 January to 11-15 April due to evolving COVID situation in Belgium.
The registered participants can cancel their registration by sending an email to info@epixfab.eu.
No action is necessary from those registered participants who intend to join on the new date for the course. We will keep you updated.
In April, the course may extend the COVID-reduced course size from 15 participants to 25 participants.
Stay safe!
4th ePIXfab Silicon Photonics
Design Course
10-14 January 2022, Ghent University (Belgium)
Here you learn to make
your own
silicon photonics chips
What is covered in the course?
The Specialist Course on Silicon Photonics Design goes from ideation to characterization of a working silicon photonics chip.
The course focuses on the process to translate a photonic circuit idea into a working chip, going from schematic design and circuit simulation to layout, routing, and interactive design rule checking.
As part of the course, the participants get the opportunity to actually tape out a design that will be fabricated with an e-beam prototyping service and characterized. Based on these results, the design can be improved and submitted to a wafer-scale multi-project-wafer run of which the participants will receive the final chips.
Who can benefit from it?
The hands-on course is designed for researchers and engineers with a fundamental understanding of photonic integrated circuits.
The course is full. We may decide to extend the COVID-reduced course capacity from 15 participants to 25 participants depending on the situation in April. You can click the below button to join the waiting list.
Key features of the course
Achieve mastery in silicon photonics integrated circuit design
Full coverage of circuits, components, simulation, layout, tape-outs, …
Five days hands-on design lab going all the way from idea to PIC
Get your silicon photonics design fabricated and have it characterized
Practical information
Course Instructor
Content of the course
From: 2 PM to 5.30 PM
| Topics |
|---|
| Introduction to the course |
| Introduction to photonic ICs and silicon photonics |
| Design flow for silicon Photonic ICs |
| Hands-on: Basics of Jupyter notebooks, Python |
| Hands-on: Constructing circuits |
From 09:00 AM to 12:30 PM
| Topics |
|---|
| Introducing the tape-outs and PDKs |
| Introducing the design project |
| The Silicon Photonics ecosystem |
| Parametric cells (PCells) |
| Parametric and custom layout |
| Hands-on: Exploring the PDKs and the PICAZZO library |
| Hands-on: Setting up the project |
| Hands-on: PCells and Layout |
From 13:30 PM to 17:00 PM
| Topics |
|---|
| Waveguides and building blocks |
| Hands-on: Waveguides: dispersion, non-linearity , sensitivity |
| Hands-on: Directional couplers and other building blocks |
Evening Activity (Food provided – subject to COVID conditions)
- Using Lean techniques in a Fabless environment
- Hands-on: Playing the “Fab game”
From 09:00 AM to 12:30 PM
| Topics |
|---|
| Component design and electromagnetic simulation |
| Hands-on: component designs, simulations and optimizations |
| Circuit design and simulations (frequency and time domain) |
| Hands-on: Circuit simulation |
| Simulation models for components |
From 1:30 AM to 5:00 PM
| Topics |
|---|
| Optical Wavelength Filters: Interferometers, AWGs, Echelle gratings and Rings |
| Hands-on: Wavelength filters |
Evening Activity (Food provided – subject to COVID conditions)
- Organizing your design flows and teams
- Design of Experiment
- Hands-on – Idea-generation for project designs
From 09:00 AM to 12:30 PM
| Topics |
|---|
| Understanding the CMOS Process flow (for photonics) |
From 1:30 AM to 4:00 PM
| Topics |
|---|
| Programmable Photonics |
| Hands-on: Configuring waveguide meshes |
| Hands-on: Project Work and Exercises |
After 16:30:
- Visit to the “Castle of the Counts” (Subject to conditions)
18:30 onwards:
- Course dinner (Subject to conditions)
From 09:00 AM to 12:30 PM
| Topics |
|---|
| Design for Manufacturability |
| Variability and parasitics |
| Hands-on: Tape-out process and design verification |
| Hands-on: Photonic parasitics |
| Hands-on: Variability analysis |
From 1:30 AM to 5:00 PM
| Topics |
|---|
| Analysis of measurement data |
| Hands-on: Data analysis and parameter extraction |
| Wrap up. |
Detailed program: Download
