Electronic-Photonic Co-Design of Co-Packaged Optics in Schematic-Driven Layout Design Flow for Photonic Integrated Circuits

The transition from pluggable optics to co-packaged optics is having an impact on the photonic integrated circuit design automation. Traditionally, chip designers for fiber-optic systems using electronic design automation tools frequently needed a way to model a few photonic components in the same design environment with the electronics. Examples include modeling lasers or modulators with electrical driver circuits, or modeling receiver electronics with photodetector. These designs focused primarily on optimizing electronics and it was typically sufficient to model a few photonic components through electrically equivalent circuit representations using SPICE or Verilog-A. However, with the advances in silicon photonics, the photonic component count in modern PICs is rapidly growing raising serious concerns over efficacy and reliability of treating photonics as electronics. This paper describes an E-O co-design approach that (i) does not require user intervention on RF and photonic domain demarcations, and (ii) supports schematic-driven layout and back-annotation.