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Technical Information

Technical information for getting the most from your tools

Guides, technical notes, seminars and materials, and release notes. From first adoption through to day-to-day design and analysis, this is where you can find what you need.

01Design and Analysis GuidesHow to use each product, and the workflows it fits02Technical NotesTechnical topics that span products03Seminars and MaterialsUpcoming sessions, recordings and published materials04Release NotesUpdate information for each product

Design and Analysis Guides

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Guide articles collected in one place, covering everything from basic operation and analysis setup through to practical workflows.

FDTD simulation model of a photonic crystal nanocavity, showing the lattice and the cavity defect

CPO for AI Data Centres: What Should You Simulate in a Silicon Photonics Design?

The electrical channel runs out first Put 128 ports of 800 Gb/s on one switch and the hard part is not the optics. It is getting the signal from the ASIC to the faceplate. Board, connector and package loss all scale with frequency, so moving…
Schematic of light incident on a metalens propagating as several outgoing rays and forming a focal spot in the far field

Large-Scale Metalens: Ray Propagation

A practical workflow for designing and analysing centimetre-scale metalenses across Lumerical and Zemax OpticStudio: building a meta-atom database with RCWA, exchanging data through HDF5, ray tracing, and exporting GDS.
Fiber to Photonic Chip coupling with a microlens

Coupling Fibre to a Photonic Chip: a Microlens and Edge Coupler Approach

How to design coupling from an optical fibre into a photonic chip using a microlens and an edge coupler: fibre mode analysis in Lumerical MODE, alignment evaluation with POP in OpticStudio, and analysis of the coupling region with FDTD and EME.
Schematic of a coupling simulation between a grating coupler and an optical fibre

Improving Optical Coupling Efficiency in Photonic Integrated Circuits: Co-Designing a Microlens and Grating Coupler

How to raise fibre-to-waveguide coupling efficiency by co-designing a grating coupler and a microlens. Fields solved in Lumerical FDTD are passed to Zemax OpticStudio as ZBF, where POP is used to evaluate lens curvature and placement in a multi-scale analysis.
FDTD simulation model of a photonic crystal nanocavity, showing the lattice and the cavity defect

Designing and Analysing Photonic Crystal Nanocavities (FDTD / varFDTD)

How to reproduce and verify the design and analysis of H1 and H2 photonic crystal nanocavities in Lumerical FDTD and MODE varFDTD, covering resonance spectra, symmetric boundary conditions, mode profiles, mesh settings and Q-factor evaluation.

Guides by product

Ansys LumericalZemax OpticStudioAnsys SpeosPhotonica

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Technical Notes

A closer look at individual topics

Articles on technical topics that span products: modelling approaches, convergence and accuracy, working with material data, and more.

Lumerical FDTD GPU Solver: Requirements and Current Limitations

A summary of the Lumerical FDTD GPU solver: NVIDIA CUDA driver and GPU hardware requirements, how licensing is counted from SM count, the conditions a simulation must meet, and the current limitations on solvers, sources and monitors.
Bloch and periodic boundary conditions at oblique incidence in Lumerical FDTD: suppression of boundary scattering by phase correction

Bloch Boundary Conditions in Lumerical FDTD and MODE: Principle, Settings and Computational Cost

Bloch boundary conditions in Lumerical FDTD and MODE: how they differ from periodic boundaries, the phase correction for oblique incidence, and the cost of complex-valued fields (twice the memory and twice the time). Also covers when to use BFAST instead and the Source Angle setting that prevents boundary scattering.
Ring resonator transmission spectra from varFDTD, 3D FDTD and 2D FDTD, demonstrating 3D-level accuracy at much lower compute cost

Why varFDTD Suits Large PIC Design: Accuracy and Speed Against BPM and EME

varFDTD in Lumerical MODE treats a 3D waveguide structure as an efficient 2D model, which makes propagation analysis far faster. This article covers how it differs from FDTD, BPM and EME, benchmarks speed against accuracy, and shows where it fits in PIC design.

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Release Notes

Update information for each product

Information on new features, changes and supported versions for each product.

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Support

When the technical information does not answer your question

Customers who hold a license can send individual questions to our Japanese-language technical support. Training at the point of adoption is also arranged through support.

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Products

Learn about the products themselves

The product list explains where each product fits and how to choose between them.

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If you cannot find what you are looking for, please get in touch

Tell us the product, the version and what you are trying to do, and we will point you to the relevant materials and guides.

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