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New Solution Increases Optoelectronic Simulation Speed

Acceleware and Synopsys unveiled a new hardware solution in January at Photonics West in San Jose, Calif. Their solution enables up to 20 times faster electromagnetic simulation of optoelectronic devices such as CMOS sensors.

It links Synopsys' TCAD Sentaurustm Device simulation software with Acceleware's ClusterInABox Quad Q30 workstation and enables an order-of-magnitude speed-up of the high accuracy finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) electromagnetic modeling algorithm used in the Sentaurus Device. The performance in allows engineers to leverage the rigor and accuracy of the FDTD method in designing and optimizing optoelectronic devices while shortening the product development cycle.

CMOS sensors which, of course, are used in camera phones, webcams, digital cameras and camcorders, now have to pack more pixels into each device, as well as be cost-effective to produce. These tools perform over a wide range of light incidence angles, lens shapes, pixel sizes and other factors.

FDTD simulations typically require tens of hours to fully characterize a CMOS sensor design in 3D. The new hardware solution reduces the FDTD simulation time by as much as 20 times, allowing engineers to carry out more extensive simulations studies.

The solution also includes built-in NVIDIA GPUs, which deliver up to two teraflops of computational power, which also significantly accelerates FDTD simulations of optoelectronic devices.