Potential features: Tidy3D backend? gdsfactory export?

[jan-david-fischbach]

Have you seen the Adjoint plugin in Tidy3D? Seems quite interesting to me as a alternative to ceviche, that also does 3D... @flaport do you think it might make sense to look into that? @joamatab should we also think about a way to easily export the resulting optimized geometry and simulation results (e.g. scattering parameters) to gdsfactory? Would you rather export the pixelized shape or a marching squares representation?

[joamatab]

Hi Jan-David,

it would be great to expand gdsfactory adjoint demos with this

For pixelized shape you can use https://github.com/gdsfactory/gdsfactory/blob/main/gdsfactory/read/from_np.py

@tylerflex @mrbaozi @momchil-flex @skandanC

[tylerflex]

Just a heads up, for handling pixelated shape in Tidy3D, best is to use our new CustomMedium component, introduced also in this pre-release.

• Api reference
• Tutorial

There is a corresponding jax wrapper for this, which can be used for adjoint-based inverse design.

• Api reference
• Tutorial

Note that in the first pre-release 1.9.0rc1, this is a bit slow with several thousand pixels. In 1.9.0rc2 coming out in the next few days or next week, we will introduce significant speed up which makes inverse design with tens of thousands of pixels or more possible.

Here is an example:

[lucasgrjn]

Just a heads up, for handling pixelated shape in Tidy3D, best is to use our new CustomMedium component, introduced also in this pre-release.

Really cool to see the new possibilites of Tidy3D ! :)

[tylerflex]

A lot more cool stuff coming soon! including many 3D inverse design demos.

[lucasgrjn]

Have you seen the Adjoint plugin in Tidy3D? Seems quite interesting to me as a alternative to ceviche, that also does 3D...

Actually, the most intersting on this point, will be to make a kind of "general optimizer". Then, the user can choose which simulator he would use (tidy3d, spins, ceviche, jaxwell, any other FDTD/FDFD...) and include it.

joamatab should we also think about a way to easily export the resulting optimized geometry and simulation results (e.g. scattering parameters) to gdsfactory? Would you rather export the pixelized shape or a marching squares representation?

For export, a possible way will be to export touches (or kind of) and the brush. Then, upon loading, the design can be generated using basic GDS shapes (circle or square) and some boolean operations (fusion). Another direction can be using some levelset methods.