Optical Waveguide Channel Routing with Reduced Bend-Loss for Photonic Integrated Circuits

Abstract

Silicon photonics (Si-photonics) is a potential technology that integrates the electronic and optical circuits on a single chip, in order to satisfy the increasing demand of highspeed and low-power dissipation in the current very-large-scale integration circuits. It has opened up the research directions in the domain of design automation for photonic integrated circuits. While deciding the physical layout of the optical circuits on the substrate, it is crucial to obtain the optimal routing of optical waveguides. The optical channel routing problem is a multiobjective optimization problem, in which all the parameters like the total bend loss, the total propagation loss, the total crossing loss, and the total number of tracks are required to be minimized. However, in comparison to propagation and crossing loss, the bending loss has a higher impact on the total signal loss. In this paper, a grid-based method has been proposed for optical waveguide channel routing (OWCR) while reducing the total bend loss and the total number of tracks. Simulation results reveals that OWCR can reduce the total bend loss by 25.82 % and 36.57 % over the state-of-the-art technique for h = 1 and h = 1.732, respectively, while increasing the total number of tracks by 18.68 %.