Leveraging continuous material averaging for inverse electromagnetic design

Journal Article · 25 November 2018 · Optics Express

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1364/oe.26.031717 · OSTI ID:1572787

Michaels, Andrew  ^[1]; Yablonovitch, Eli ^[1]

---

1. Univ. of California, Berkeley, CA (United States). Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

Inverse electromagnetic design has emerged as a way of efficiently designing active and passive electromagnetic devices. This maturing strategy involves optimizing the shape or topology of a device in order to improve a figure of merit-a process which typically requires that we compute the gradient of a figure of merit which describes device performance, potentially with respect to many design variables. In this paper, we introduce a new strategy based on smoothing abrupt material interfaces which enables us to efficiently compute these gradients with high accuracy irrespective of the resolution of the underlying simulation. This has advantages over previous approaches to shape and topology optimization in nanophotonics which are either prone to gradient errors or place important constraints on the shape of the device. As a demonstration of this new strategy, we optimize a non-adiabatic waveguide taper between a narrow and wide waveguide. Finally, this optimization leads to a non-intuitive design with a very low insertion loss of only 0.041 dB at 1550 nm.

• Research Organization: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Science (SC)
• Grant/Contract Number: AC02-05CH11231
• OSTI ID: 1572787
• Journal Information: Optics Express, Journal Name: Optics Express Journal Issue: 24 Vol. 26; ISSN 1094-4087; ISSN OPEXFF
• Publisher: Optical Society of America (OSA)Copyright Statement
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English