Photonics-Aware Planning-Guided Automated Electrical Routing for Large-Scale Active Photonic Integrated Circuits

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Zhou, Hongjian, Yang, Haoyu, Gangi, Nicholas, Liu, Bowen, Zhang, Meng, Ren, Haoxing, Wang, Xu, Huang, Rena, Gu, Jiaqi
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Zhou, Hongjian
Yang, Haoyu
Gangi, Nicholas
Liu, Bowen
Zhang, Meng
Ren, Haoxing
Wang, Xu
Huang, Rena
Gu, Jiaqi
author_facet Zhou, Hongjian
Yang, Haoyu
Gangi, Nicholas
Liu, Bowen
Zhang, Meng
Ren, Haoxing
Wang, Xu
Huang, Rena
Gu, Jiaqi
contents The rising demand for AI training and inference, as well as scientific computing, combined with stringent latency and energy budgets, is driving the adoption of integrated photonics for computing, sensing, and communications. As active photonic integrated circuits (PICs) scale in device count and functional heterogeneity, physical implementation by manual scripting and ad-hoc edits is no longer tenable. This creates an immediate need for an electronic-photonic design automation (EPDA) stack in which physical design automation is a core capability. However, there is currently no end-to-end fully automated routing flow that coordinates photonic waveguides and on-chip metal interconnect. Critically, available digital VLSI and analog/custom routers are not directly applicable to PIC metal routing due to a lack of customization to handle constraints induced by photonic devices and waveguides. We present, to our knowledge, the first end-to-end routing framework for large-scale active PICs that jointly addresses waveguides and metal wires within a unified flow. We introduce a physically-aware global planner that generates congestion- and crossing-aware routing guides while explicitly accounting for the placement of photonic components and waveguides. We further propose a sequence-consistent track assignment and a soft guidance-assisted detailed routing to speed up the routing process with significantly optimized routability and via usage. Evaluated on various large PIC designs, our router delivers fast, high-quality active PIC routing solutions with fewer vias, lower congestion, and competitive runtime relative to manual and existing VLSI router baselines; on average it reduce via count by ~99%, user-specified design rule violation by ~98%, and runtime by 17x, establishing a practical foundation for EPDA at system scale.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_23764
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Photonics-Aware Planning-Guided Automated Electrical Routing for Large-Scale Active Photonic Integrated Circuits
Zhou, Hongjian
Yang, Haoyu
Gangi, Nicholas
Liu, Bowen
Zhang, Meng
Ren, Haoxing
Wang, Xu
Huang, Rena
Gu, Jiaqi
Optics
Emerging Technologies
The rising demand for AI training and inference, as well as scientific computing, combined with stringent latency and energy budgets, is driving the adoption of integrated photonics for computing, sensing, and communications. As active photonic integrated circuits (PICs) scale in device count and functional heterogeneity, physical implementation by manual scripting and ad-hoc edits is no longer tenable. This creates an immediate need for an electronic-photonic design automation (EPDA) stack in which physical design automation is a core capability. However, there is currently no end-to-end fully automated routing flow that coordinates photonic waveguides and on-chip metal interconnect. Critically, available digital VLSI and analog/custom routers are not directly applicable to PIC metal routing due to a lack of customization to handle constraints induced by photonic devices and waveguides. We present, to our knowledge, the first end-to-end routing framework for large-scale active PICs that jointly addresses waveguides and metal wires within a unified flow. We introduce a physically-aware global planner that generates congestion- and crossing-aware routing guides while explicitly accounting for the placement of photonic components and waveguides. We further propose a sequence-consistent track assignment and a soft guidance-assisted detailed routing to speed up the routing process with significantly optimized routability and via usage. Evaluated on various large PIC designs, our router delivers fast, high-quality active PIC routing solutions with fewer vias, lower congestion, and competitive runtime relative to manual and existing VLSI router baselines; on average it reduce via count by ~99%, user-specified design rule violation by ~98%, and runtime by 17x, establishing a practical foundation for EPDA at system scale.
title Photonics-Aware Planning-Guided Automated Electrical Routing for Large-Scale Active Photonic Integrated Circuits
topic Optics
Emerging Technologies
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.23764