Today at SPIE Photonics West 2024 in San Francisco we are announcing Connect-A-PIC, an open-source automated photonic circuit design and simulation platform for fast iteration and education.
While photonics is gaining more and more traction, the barrier to entry remains high. Apart from domain knowledge in photonics, existing tools require programming experience, are very complex and often too expensive for newcomers interested in the field. We propose lowering the entry barrier significantly, by providing a free and open-source photonics design framework called Connect-A-PIC. Connect-A-PIC is an educational and productive tool for photonic integrated circuit (PIC) design and simulation. Using a no-code inspired, visual user interface, the goal is to enable anyone with some basic knowledge in optics to learn, explore and create PICs, from design and simulation to synthesized layouts for fabrication. Connect-A-PIC introduces a novel type of standard component library (SCL) for fast and simple netlist generation. The modular design allows for expansion of the SCL and functionality and re-targeting of the output to other tools for more advanced design and simulation needs.
You can check out Connect-A-PIC over on our GitHub repository: https://github.com/Akhetonics/Connect-A-PIC
