Inverse Design of High Performance Silicon Photonic Devices

Inverse design has triggered great research interests in integrated photonic design. It can be  advantageous in discovering new photonic devices, because, unlike traditional device design (or forward design) where only a few parameters can be swept, a high-order multi-dimensional parameter space can be searched with an advance optimization algorithm for a global fitness that is often correlated with one or more performance metrics of the targeted device. Recently, such design concept has been applied to obtain ultra-compact photonic devices. They, however, suffer greatly from performance degradation due to large out-of-plane scattering from strong scattering processes. In this talk, we utilize the concept of inverse design and show that it is possible to design ultra-compact and highly performance silicon photonic devices that may have potential impact in future very large scale silicon photonic integrated circuits.