Photonic design software enhances BSDF capabilities

The new capabilities can help designers gain an in-depth understanding of the underlying physics of photonic devices as well as insights into how they can increase device performance.

George Bayz, Vice President and General Manager, Optical Solutions Group, Synopsys, commented: "The latest release of the RSoft Photonic Component Design Suite enables advanced design flows for modelling optical surface scattering properties in nanotechnology applications, helping designers optimise device efficiency and satisfy stringent performance, size and cost requirements."

The RSoft Photonic Component Design Suite includes enhancements to its BSDF (Bidirectional Scattering Distribution Function) capabilities for the design and optimisation of complex optical structures used in LEDs, OLEDs and displays. BSDF capabilities provide a highly accurate method for modelling optical surface scattering properties and the enhancements significantly speed BSDF calculations and simulations as well as enable users to visualise BSDF file contents. RSoft BSDF files can be imported into Synopsys' LightTools illumination design software to facilitate the design of lighting systems with small-feature, diffractive optical structures. The unique, mixed-level simulation approach between the RSoft products and LightTools helps optical designers improve the design of LEDs, OLEDs and nano-textured displays to enhance light extraction efficiency, beam shaping and colour tuning.

The RSoft BSDF enhancements include:

• Increased BSDF User-Defined Optical Properties (UDOP) speed of up to five times for all LightTools simulations and up to 40 times speedup for unpolarised cases. Users working with colour displays, LED and OLED applications can now more efficiently perform mixed-level simulation using RSoft tools and LightTools in order to accurately model the effects of nanoscale textured or patterned surfaces within these types of devices.
• A new option that allows users to distribute the RSoft BSDF calculation using multiple CPUs or cores on one or more computers. This can significantly improve BSDF calculations, enabling easier characterisation and optimisation of surface properties using either RSoft DiffractMOD or FullWAVE solutions. The option requires a MOST cluster license and also allows for increased efficiency for mixed-level RSoft and LightTools simulations.
• The new BSDF Viewer enables RSoft BSDF file content visualisation. Users can view the BSDF data as a function of incident angle, wavelength, polarisation and side (front and back). This allows users to extract simulation results and replicate the RSoft BSDF UDOP behaviour for simple illumination cases.

The RSoft Photonic Component Design Suite version 2016.03 is available now. Customers with a current maintenance agreement can download the software from the Synopsys website using their SolvNet account.