Introduction

Welcome to the CamachoLab Photonics Bootcamp, created with support from Google.

We present a new open-source, online and freely available set of course material and resources for teaching integrated photonic design and simulation to electrical engineers and students with an interest in photonic engineering. In collaboration with Google, we’ve designed a curriculum complete with background motivation material, code examples, component and system design problems, and full circuit examples that teach learners a series of open-source Python tools and guide them step-by-step through design, simulation, and modeling, giving them the resources and information on how to submit their devices for manufacturing should they wish to test their devices’ performance. Open-source tools include Meep [1] for FDTD simulation, Simphony [2] for creating compact models and simulating larger circuits, and gdsfactory [3] for layout of GDS files for submission to fabrication facilities. Introductions to open-source software for testing PICs post-fabrication and instructional material on analyzing the results are also included in the course.

The course is hosted on GitHub, allowing for contributions from subject-matter experts and future expansion of covered material. It can also be forked by parties interested in creating a more customized set of materials for their own trainings or courses. The website is written in the format of Jupyter Notebooks allowing code to be embedded inline with the explanatory material. It also allows entire webpages and their code examples to be launched directly into a Google Colab environment or downloaded directly and run locally, allowing learners to have an immediate connection between the teaching material and putting the principles into practice.

As with many things in open-source, there’s always multiple ways to do the same thing. In this course, workflows will be presented with one approach, single tools will be introduced as if they’re the only option, and we usually won’t bother mentioning all the different possible system configurations. All the software we will be using is cross-platform, however. And, if you’d like to use a different tool, or a different code editor, if you have the know-how, go ahead! To keep things simple and standardized for us, however, we’ll give instructions just for one single method.

References

1

Ardavan F Oskooi, David Roundy, Mihai Ibanescu, Peter Bermel, John D Joannopoulos, and Steven G Johnson. Meep: a flexible free-software package for electromagnetic simulations by the fdtd method. Computer Physics Communications, 181(3):687–702, 2010.

2

Sequoia Ploeg, Hyrum Gunther, and Ryan M Camacho. Simphony: an open-source photonic integrated circuit simulation framework. Computing in Science & Engineering, 23(1):65–74, 2020.

3

Joaquin Matres. Gdsfactory documentation. online, 2023. URL: https://gdsfactory.github.io/gdsfactory/.