Simphony: An open-source photonic integrated circuit simulation framework

TL;DR

Simphony is an open-source Python-based framework for simulating photonic integrated circuits, offering high speed, extensibility, and ease of use, with significant performance improvements over commercial tools.

Contribution

It introduces a flexible, open-source simulation toolbox for photonic circuits that is faster and more extensible than existing commercial software.

Findings

Achieves over 20x speedup compared to commercial software

Provides easy plugin and device library development

Includes multiple example simulations with novel features

Abstract

We present Simphony, a free and open-source software toolbox for abstracting and simulating photonic integrated circuits, implemented in Python. The toolbox is both fast and easily extensible; plugins can be written to provide compatibility with existing layout tools, and device libraries can be easily created without a deep knowledge of programming. We include several examples of photonic circuit simulations with novel features and demonstrate a speedup of more than 20x over a leading commercially available software tool.