CrystalWave

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Introduction

What is CrystalWave?

CrystalWave is a design environment for the layout and design of integrated optics components optimised for the design of photonic crystal structures. It is supports our Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) and Finite Element Frequency Domain (FEFD) simulators and includes a mask file generator carefully optimised for planar photonic crystal structures.

It also features a fast and user-friendly Band Structure Analyser relying on plane-wave expansion (PWE), allowing you to calculate band diagrams and band surfaces (equifrequency curves) in 2D and 3D structures.

CrystalWave is available as a native 32-bit and 64-bit application. The 64-bit version of CrystalWave allows you to include large amounts of memory in your FEFD and FDTD calculations. In combination with the SMP capability (symmetric multi-processing) of the FDTD engine, this enables CrystalWave to simulate large devices at very high speed!

Simulation of a Y-junction with the CrystalWave FDTD engine.
 

CrystalWave includes a 2D and 3D FDTD engine. This has been designed from the ground up for the computation of photonic crystals and independent tests have measured the 3D FDTD Engine to be the World's fastest for this application and at the same time using much less memory than other implementations. The Finite Element Frequency Domain (FEFD) engine for CrystalWave allows you to compute a steady state (single frequency) response for your device in a small fraction of the time it would take in FDTD – to be seen to be believed! (2D simulation only)

Our market leading automatic optimiser Kallistos is available to drive the frequency domain engine – together these two tools will reduce design times to a fraction of what is currently possible, making the design of complex PBG circuits a practical reality for all.