Apollo: Automated Routing-Informed Placement for Large-Scale Photonic Integrated Circuits

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhou, Hongjian, Yang, Haoyu, Gangi, Nicholas, Ren, Haoxing, Huang, Rena, Gu, Jiaqi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Zhou, Hongjian
Yang, Haoyu
Gangi, Nicholas
Ren, Haoxing
Huang, Rena
Gu, Jiaqi
author_facet Zhou, Hongjian
Yang, Haoyu
Gangi, Nicholas
Ren, Haoxing
Huang, Rena
Gu, Jiaqi
contents As technology advances, photonic integrated circuits (PICs) are rapidly scaling in size and complexity, with modern designs integrating thousands of components. However, the analog custom layout nature of photonics, the curvy waveguide structures, and single-layer routing resources impose stringent physical constraints, such as minimum bend radii and waveguide crossing penalties, which make manual layout the de facto standard. This manual process takes weeks to complete and is error-prone, which is fundamentally unscalable for large-scale PIC systems. Existing automation solutions have adopted force-directed placement on small benchmarks with tens of components, with limited routability and scalability. To fill this fundamental gap in the electronic-photonic design automation (EPDA) toolchain, we present the first GPU-accelerated, routing-informed placement framework. It features an asymmetric bending-aware wirelength function with explicit modeling of waveguide routing congestion and crossings for routability maximization. Meanwhile, conditional projection is employed to gradually enforce a variety of user-defined layout constraints, including alignment, spacing, etc. This constrained optimization is accelerated and stabilized by a custom blockwise adaptive Nesterov-accelerated optimizer, ensuring stable and high-quality convergence. Compared to existing methods, our method can generate high-quality layouts for large-scale PICs with an average routing success rate of 94.79% across all benchmarks within minutes. By tightly coupling placement with physical-aware routing, our method establishes a new paradigm for automated PIC design, bringing intelligent, scalable layout synthesis to the forefront of next-generation EPDA. Our code is open-sourced at https://github.com/ScopeX-ASU/Apollo.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_18813
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Apollo: Automated Routing-Informed Placement for Large-Scale Photonic Integrated Circuits
Zhou, Hongjian
Yang, Haoyu
Gangi, Nicholas
Ren, Haoxing
Huang, Rena
Gu, Jiaqi
Emerging Technologies
Optics
As technology advances, photonic integrated circuits (PICs) are rapidly scaling in size and complexity, with modern designs integrating thousands of components. However, the analog custom layout nature of photonics, the curvy waveguide structures, and single-layer routing resources impose stringent physical constraints, such as minimum bend radii and waveguide crossing penalties, which make manual layout the de facto standard. This manual process takes weeks to complete and is error-prone, which is fundamentally unscalable for large-scale PIC systems. Existing automation solutions have adopted force-directed placement on small benchmarks with tens of components, with limited routability and scalability. To fill this fundamental gap in the electronic-photonic design automation (EPDA) toolchain, we present the first GPU-accelerated, routing-informed placement framework. It features an asymmetric bending-aware wirelength function with explicit modeling of waveguide routing congestion and crossings for routability maximization. Meanwhile, conditional projection is employed to gradually enforce a variety of user-defined layout constraints, including alignment, spacing, etc. This constrained optimization is accelerated and stabilized by a custom blockwise adaptive Nesterov-accelerated optimizer, ensuring stable and high-quality convergence. Compared to existing methods, our method can generate high-quality layouts for large-scale PICs with an average routing success rate of 94.79% across all benchmarks within minutes. By tightly coupling placement with physical-aware routing, our method establishes a new paradigm for automated PIC design, bringing intelligent, scalable layout synthesis to the forefront of next-generation EPDA. Our code is open-sourced at https://github.com/ScopeX-ASU/Apollo.
title Apollo: Automated Routing-Informed Placement for Large-Scale Photonic Integrated Circuits
topic Emerging Technologies
Optics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.18813