Silicon photonics has emerged from research labs and is currently being used in a range of commercial products, with significant growth expected over the next few years. Current and future applications include transceivers for datacoms in datacenters and 5G, as well as a variety of sensors from medical diagnostics to LIDAR. Even longer-term applications such as artificial intelligence and quantum information technologies are in development. This growth is supported by a wide range of foundries who offer silicon photonic processes, as well as an ecosystem of design tools. We present an innovative design flow for electronic photonic design automation (EPDA) which fully supports industrial product development. This flow combines the best-in-class tools for schematic capture, co-simulation and implementation, combined with the leading photonic solvers for custom component optimization, parameter extraction and photonic compact model development. We discuss how it combines the maturity of EDA with requirements unique to photonic design.

The electronics industry is increasingly focused on the consumer marketplace, which requires low-cost high-volume products to be developed very rapidly. This, combined with advances in deep submicrometer technology have resulted in the ability and the need to put entire systems on a single chip. As more of the system is included on a single chip, it is increasingly likely that the chip will contain both analog and digital sections. Developing these mixed-signal (MS) systems-on-chip presents enormous challenges both to the designers of the chips and to the developers of the computer-aided design (CAD) systems that are used during the design process. This paper presents many of the issues that act to complicate the development of large single-chip MS systems and how CAD systems are expected to develop to overcome these issues.