Active FDTD

Photon Design offers the World’s first commercial active FDTD tool adding the ability to model semiconductor gain within an FDTD engine. Now you can at last model photonic crystal and other micro-cavity lasers realistically.

Littrow lasing simulated in a W15 line defect constructed in an InGaAsP QW material and electrically pumped. The simulation includes a dynamic carrier model. 

Features

• Rate equation model of carriers including spontaneous recombination, stimulated recombination, injection current.
• Multiple-Lorentzian gain model, with automatic fitting to a set of gain curves (g(l) at a set of different carrier densities).
• Convergence Acceleration – normally the spontaneous lifetime is too long to model in fdtd (would require too many fdtd time steps). Convergence Acceleration gets the device into the correct steady state more quickly.
• Fully integrated into the OmniSim and CrystalWave user-interfaces.
• Almost all features of the FDTD engine available (excluding sub-gridding – possibly available in a future version).
• Current injection is controlled by an Editor mask-layer, allowing you to readily inject current anywhere you want.
• All gain-material parameters are stored in a standard Photon Design material database file (.mat).
• Speed: in general the gain material is confined to a small layer – a fraction of the total simulation volume. Therefore the module does not significantly slow down the simulation speed.

Applications include photonic crystal lasers and VCSELs.

Download Active-FDTD specifications