Ansys Lumerical Case Studies

Challenge for Ansys:  Simulating Liquid Crystal Metasurfaces for Beam Steering Technology

• To revolutionize perception systems in the emerging self-driving car industry
• To develop liquid crystal metamaterials to enable LiDAR systems to achieve compact size and low cost
• Quick and accurate models to validate beam-steering performance

Ansys Lumerical Solution

• Developed a customized workflow using Ansys Lumerical FDTD, AWS EC2 Services and Ansys Lumerical Automation API
• High-performing Ansys Lumerical FDTD works seamlessly with EC2 for increased simulation performance with minimal setup time
• The renewable automotive company used Lumerical’s Automation API to gain access to open source tools necessary for optimization and post-processing

Ansys Lumerical Business Impact:

Thankfully, the client was able to reduce their design time by two orders of magnitude without compromising on accuracy.  Previous photonic simulations running on their workstations that would take hours now finished in minutes

With Ansys Lumerical Automation API, the engineering team was able to use state-of-the-art optimization algorithms to maximize their metasurface designs with high simulation accuracy

In addition, the design crew was able to quickly and efficiently confirm the correct functionality of their metasurface design allowing them to deliver their product on time and on budget

Challenge for Ansys: Enabling New Processes for Higher Component Performance

• Offer customers proprietary fabrication process expertise and design support for end-product manufacturing
• Explore new ways to improve its development process for higher component performance, reduced costs, improved yield, increased engineering productivity, and a shorter design cycle
• Identify new ways to improve one of the most complex photonic components, the SiPh grating coupler

Ansys Lumerical Solution

• Ansys Lumerical’s Photonic Inverse Design (PID) was used to design and optimize a new grating coupler with Ansys Lumerical’s industry leading FDTD simulator
• PID enabled designers to rapidly develop optimized functionality with improved performance, reduced footprint, and more robust manufacturability
• Ansys Lumerical’s cloud features were used to rapidly accelerate the design effort

Ansys Lumerical Business Impact: 

• With the adoption of Lumerical, the engineering team was able to develop a SiPh grating coupler with a 20x smaller footprint than their previous coupler.  In addition, through advanced photonic simulations, was able able to improve product consistency and overall performance.
• In only two weeks, optimal designs for eight manufacturable variants were developed.

Challenge for Ansys: Simulating Microcavity OLEDs for Light Field Displays

• Improving the emission characteristics of OLEDS across viewing zones for high pixel-density OLED
• Support in Developing state-of-the-art microcavity-based OLEDS

Ansys Lumerical Solution

• High-performing Ansys Lumerical FDTD was used to develop microcavity based OLEDs.
• FDTD’s scripting capabilities made it possible for the team to quickly develop highly accurate models.
• In addition, FDTD’ rapid photonics simulations significantly reduced the trial and tuning iterations, typically required for fabrication.

Ansys Lumerical Business Impact

• The business partner was successful able to develop a microcavity based OLED.
• Compared to standard OLEDs, the Full Width at Half Max (FHWM) of spectral output, a key performance metric, was reduced by 2 to 2.5 times depending on the color.
• In addition, the team was able to show through FDTD simulations that their proposed design agreed with measured results.