Cosimulation with Agilent's Advanced Design System (ADS)
The performance of electronic components within or around an optical communications system may have a significant impact on the performance of the system as a whole. Systems-level models are used in most simulations of optical transmission links to represent the behavior of electrical components (e.g., drivers, coders, receivers, clock and data recovery) by equivalent noise, nonlinearity, gain and frequency-dependent functions.
A better understanding of the interactions between the electronic and photonic parts of a link can be obtained when full electronic circuit models are incorporated directly into the systems simulation. Using full electronic models in the optical simulation also saves the time required for abstracting an electronic model to a behavioral model at each design iteration.
Advanced Design System (ADS) by Agilent Technologies is a powerful electronic circuit design environment that is well suited for modeling high-frequency analog and digital circuits within optical communications systems. Furthermore, ADS provides extensive libraries of components and materials for high-frequency designs.
VPIphotonics developed in cooperation with Agilent Technologie a cosimulation interface that allows to utilize the ADS simulation environment from within VPIphotonics' optical systems and components design tools. This interface calls the ADS simulator executable directly from VPItransmissionMaker / VPIcomponentMaker, so that the best technologies for photonic and electronic design work seamlessly together.
Electronics within Photonics Systems
With the help of the TC-ADS interface, it is possible to provide the electronic circuit design to the WDM systems design expert, who can use it to model the electrical component under investigation, e.g., an electrical amplifier or an electrical laser driver, within an arbitrary optical transmission system.
A typical workflow is illustrated in Figure 1. The electronic design expert uses ADS to create an electronic circuit to be used as part of a photonic system. The WDM systems designer can import this Electronic Circuit Module into VPItransmissionMaker Optical Systems, for instance, and execute it from there. When the optical system simulation is run, ADS will take inputs from VPItransmissionMaker, calculate the output waveforms of the electronic circuit and pass them back to VPItransmissionMaker. The system performance might suggest that changes to the electronic circuit design are necessary. These changes are easily incorporated into the next WDM systems simulation, without having to create a new Electronic Circuit Module.
A white paper about the cosimulation capabilities between VPItransmissionMaker / VPIcomponentMaker and ADS is available on request via support@VPIphotonics.com.
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