High-performance hybrid time/frequency-domain topology optimization for large-scale photonics inverse design

We present a photonics topology optimization (TO) package capable of addressing a wide range of practical photonics design problems, incorporating robustness and manufacturing constraints, which can scale to large devices and massive parallelism. We employ a hybrid algorithm that builds on a mature time-domain (FDTD) package Meep to simultaneously solve multiple frequency-domain TO problems over a broad bandwidth. This time/frequencydomain approach is enhanced by new filter-design sources for the gradient calculation and new material-interpolation methods for optimizing dispersive media, as well as by multiple forms of computational parallelism. The package is available as free/open-source software with extensive tutorials and multi-platform support. (C) 2022 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement

Automated summary

We present a photonics topology optimization (TO) package that can address a wide range of practical photonics design problems. The package incorporates robustness and manufacturing constraints and can scale to large devices and massive parallelism. It employs a hybrid algorithm that solves multiple frequency-domain TO problems using a mature time-domain (FDTD) package and is enhanced by new filter-design sources and material-interpolation methods.