Ansys Teams Up with Microsoft and TSMC for Photonic Simulation

Ansys and TSMC announce a pilot with Microsoft that speeds up the simulation and analysis of silicon photonic components. The companies achieved a speedup of Ansys Lumerical finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) photonics simulation via Microsoft Azure NC A100v4-series virtual machines, powered by NVIDIA running on Azure AI infrastructure. 

Silicon photonic integrated circuits (PICs), a type of optical communications that enables data to travel farther and faster, is integral to hyperscale data centers and Internet-of-Things applications. Combining photonic and electronic circuits is a task requiring multiphysics design and fabrication, as Ansys explains.

TSMC collaborated with Ansys to speed-up Lumerical FDTD simulations using Azure virtual machines that use NVIDIA GPUs. Azure NC A100v4 VMs executed the simulations and identified optimal resources. The overall result is graphical interface access, scaling of distributed simulations, and post rocessing for large datasets in cloud environments. For an end-to-end digital engineering workflow, Azure Virtual Desktop provided a transition to the cloud by delivering the same user experience as on a desktop.

“The size and complexity of multiphysics silicon solutions makes the process of simulating all possible parameter combinations challenging,” says Stefan Rusu, head of silicon photonics system design at TSMC. “Our latest collaboration with Ansys and Microsoft will benefit designers with significantly improved design productivity by harnessing the latest cloud infrastructure and techniques to deliver powerful, predictively accurate solutions that produce results in a fraction of the time.”

Deploying Lumerical FDTD on the cloud enables designers to identify optimal chip designs that account for the multiphysics challenges related to combining photonic circuits with electronic circuits.

"Ansys has developed unique capabilities that can be closely coupled with our leading multiphysics simulation engines for photonics," says John Lee, vice president and general manager of the semiconductor, electronics, and optics business unit at Ansys. “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, CVP of Azure Infrastructure, Digital and App Innovation at Microsoft, highlighted the benefits of the ongoing collaboration with Ansys and TSMC. “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,” she said. “By working together, we aim to address the complexities of large-scale designs essential for high-quality semiconductor products. Utilizing the power and scalability of Microsoft Azure’s cloud computing is a key strategy in overcoming these challenges.”

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.