Ansys partners with TSMC & Microsoft to speed photonic sims

Ansys has announced a collaboration with TSMC and Microsoft to accelerate the simulation and analysis of silicon photonic components. This collaboration has achieved a tenfold speed-up in these processes.

The partnership uses Ansys Lumerical FDTD 3D electromagnetic simulation software for photonic components. The software has demonstrated substantial speed improvements when running on Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines using NVIDIA graphics processing units (GPUs). According to the companies, the scalability of Azure cloud enables Ansys software to offer a platform suited to ushering in the next wave of silicon Photonic Integrated Circuit (PIC) technology, which has wide-ranging applications, including in data communications, biomedical tools, automotive LiDAR systems, and artificial intelligence (AI).

Stefan Rusu, head of silicon photonics system design at TSMC, said, "The size and complexity of our multiphysics silicon solutions makes the process of simulating all possible parameter combinations challenging. This latest collaboration again highlights that Ansys effectively harnesses the latest cloud infrastructure and techniques to deliver powerful, predictively accurate solutions that produce results in a fraction of the time."

Silicon PIC is an optical communication technology that allows data to travel faster and farther, which is critical for hyperscale data centres and Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications. The combination of photonic and electronic circuits presents considerable design and fabrication challenges. A minor misstep in this process can create continuity issues within the chips, leading to increased costs and project delays.

To address these issues, TSMC and Ansys used highly efficient Azure virtual machines equipped with NVIDIA GPUs to accelerate the Lumerical FDTD simulations. The Azure NC A100v4 series virtual machines executed the simulations, identifying optimal resources that balance cost and performance. This setup enabled seamless deployment, graphical interface access, scaling of distributed simulations, and post-processing for large datasets in cloud environments. The deployment also featured Azure Virtual Desktop to provide users with a consistent experience, whether on a desktop or in the cloud.

John Lee, vice president and general manager of the semiconductor, electronics, and optics business unit at Ansys, commented, "Ansys has developed unique capabilities that can be closely coupled with our leading multiphysics simulation engines for photonics. Collaborating with TSMC and Microsoft has accelerated technologies that address high-speed optical data transfer, which is one of the most important chip design challenges today."

Shelly Blackburn, corporate vice president of Azure Infrastructure, Digital and App Innovation at Microsoft, noted the importance of this collaborative effort. "Our collaboration is a significant advantage for users seeking the combined power of HPC and AI, using the flexibility of cloud solutions while maintaining the familiar on-premises experience. By working together, we aim to address the complexities of large-scale designs essential for high-quality semiconductor products. Utilising the power and scalability of Microsoft Azure's cloud computing is a key strategy in overcoming these challenges," she stated.

This joint effort among Ansys, TSMC, and Microsoft signifies a considerable advancement in the simulation and analysis of silicon photonic components, potentially expediting developments in various high-tech industries.