Optic2Connect develops software for photonics!

Optic2Connect will be present at this year’s DAC. I caught up with Sean Seah, project manager, to find out more.

First, what’s the company’s X factor and why? (What is it that makes your offering special and noteworthy – how are you different from competitors)?

Optic2Connect develops software solutions for the photonics industry. The demand to manage high volumes of data in networks, especially with the current smart-phone and cloud computing trend, has increased tremendously. As design gets more complex, simulation tools need to scale with regard to fidelity and accuracy.

Currently, photonic designers, scientists, and fabrication engineers adopt an approximated approach from the electrical data to build an equivalent optical model, hence losing on device physics details. At the same time the process is long as the model needs to be described block-by-block with denser blocks representing a more detailed model. Our competitors are well established in their respective domains, electrical or optical, but they are strong in their own respective fields. However, intimate knowledge in both are essential to fully understand this newer generation of photonic devices. Failure to understand fully results in false results from the manufacturing.

With patented know-how, Optic2Connect provides software solutions that SOLVES this pertinent challenge. It maps accurately simulations from one domain to another, e.g. electrical to optical. This technology has been developed by a team of researchers at A*Star – Singapore Public Research Institute. The technology overcomes error-prone and detailed oriented simulation setups. We demonstrated the ability to map without losing any fidelity in the simulation files.

Optic2Connect’s IP differs from its competitors because it simulates directly from the beginning device processing, to electrical device performance until the final high-speed optical eye diagram. This is in stark contrast to the usual method of representing their operation using simplified transfer functions.

Furthermore, the Optic2Connect design flow uses the same reliable tools and processes from the semiconductor industry that are fully compatible with the Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) fabrication process of silicon microelectronics. This design flow uses standard tools libraries, device models especially for active components such as modulators, and simulation of these components incorporating the models.

How have you been doing this year so far? Seah said: “It has been excellent! We are racing to complete our product prototypes and we secured a contract from an MNC and another from universities.”

What’s the future path likely to be? Seah added: “We intend to further validate our prototype with our partners from industry and academia, and integrating advanced modulation formats into our solutions. We want to offer a fully integrated solution for photonic devices to our customers. Our goal is to offer a one-stop solution for leading integrated-circuit (IC) manufacturers!”

Why this name? You sounded like a telecom company? Seah said: “We strongly believe the future of communications is via optics which has the ability to circumvent the data bottleneck issues. Optic2Connect is meant to offer connect using optical communications. Our goal is a one-stop solution for optical connections. “

How will the solution significantly shorten product time-to-market and reduce development costs of photonics devices?

For complex photonics devices, minute changes to design parameters are significant and could affect loss performance, and operating voltage requirements. One common approach in the industry today is to physically build the variations into multiple device / runs and test them out. Each run cost is the range of hundreds of thousands and consume precious time. Especially, if the first batch of devices do not meet required parameters and additional batches are required. This cost both money and time, which in turn is more money.

Hence, Optic2Connect provides an elegant solution with our accurate modelling and simulation solutions, this accelerates manufacturing prototypes and at much lower production costs. Our software solutions provide a 10x improvement in time reduction and time to market. Further, our cloud solution overcomes traditional problems of insufficient servers / licenses, especially during periods of peak demand.