PIC Design Suite Transparent Components

Introduction

When designing photonic circuits, it might not always be known in which technology the circuit will be fabricated. Also, it is useful to be able to create a circuit design and evaluate the performance and cost in different technologies. To be able to do so, the design must be made in such a way that different foundries that supply different technologies can read the same design and implement their technology on that specific element. Synopsys provides the unique technology-agnostic library to create a design: px-elements. Many foundries that have Synopsys compatible PDK’s support this technology and implement px-elements for their own technology.

px-elements are generalized building blocks for mapping technology-agnostic components to technology specific components. Technology specific designs can be created directly using the foundry building blocks, but this makes it hard to transfer designs and thus leads to supplier lock-in. This is not always desirable. Using px-elements is a big improvement, since the design can be exported to another foundry with little effort.

This feature highlight demonstrates an example where different technologies are used to implement the same component. This layout uses generalized px-elements.

To access the px-elements, load the User Framework ``@layout`` in script. The available px-elements can then be found in the Element tab, under “User lib à PDA-BB."