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On the electronic-photonic integrated circuit design automation : modelling, design, analysis, and simulation

University of British Columbia

Photonic networks form the backbone of the data communication infrastructure. In particular, in current and future wireless communication systems, photonic networks are becoming increasingly popular for data distribution between the central office and the remote antenna units at base stations. As wireless-photonic systems become increasingly more popular, not only low-cost implementation of such systems is desirable, but also a reliable electronic-photonic design automation (EPDA) framework supporting such complex circuits and systems is crucial. This work investigates the foundation and presents implementation of various aspects of such EPDA framework. Various building blocks of silicon-photonic systems are reviewed in the first chapter of the thesis. The review discusses an example of a 60-GHz wireless system based on photonic technology, which could be suitable for the emerging 5th-generation (5G) cellular networks, and also provides design use cases that need to be supported by the EPDA framework. Integrated photonic circuits, which are the building blocks of wireless-photonic systems, will achieve their potential only if designers can efficiently and reliably design, model, simulate, and tune the performance of electro-optical components. The developed EPDA framework supports an integrated optical solver, INTERCONNECT, to provide optical time and frequency domain simulations so that a designer would be able to simulate electrical, optical, and electro-optical circuits using two developed and implemented methodologies: sequential electro-optical simulation and co-simulation. We propose an algorithm to enhance the performance of electronic simulation engines that can be integrated into the EPDA simulation methods such as Harmonic Balance. It will be shown that body-biasing of CMOS transistors can be used as an effective method for tuning the performance of the electronic section of an electro-optical design. This can help designers adjusting the performance of their designs after fabrication. Modelling of electro-optical components is discussed in this thesis; It is shown that some traditional passive components such as inductors, which take a large amount of space in CMOS processes, could be fabricated in the much lower cost photonic process and consequently the overall cost of silicon-photonic systems can be reduced significantly.

Text

2017-04-19

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/61272

Electrical and Computer Engineering

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/