Modeling and Simulation of Silicon Photonics Systems in SystemVerilog

Silicon photonics systems integrate photonic components such as optical waveguides, couplers, resonators, photodetectors, etc. along with electronic components on the same silicon chip to realize high-bandwidth, high-density, and low-power communication via wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM). This talk will address the challenges of modeling and simulating silicon photonics WDM transceivers in SystemVerilog, which contain photonic devices for WDM signaling, analog interface circuits for pulse-amplitude modulation (PAM), and digital controllers for temperature calibration. It will show that the XMODEL’s way of expressing analog signals in the Laplace domain and computing them in an event-driven fashion can be extended to simulating optical waves, even when they are treated as ~200 THz frequency signals. The talk will be given from a circuit designer’s perspective, and those without prior background in silicon photonics are all welcome to join.