Inverse Design for Photonics

Level: Introductory Length: 4 hours Format: In-Person Lecture Intended Audience: Engineers and scientists who are working on photonic devices and their optimization. Good understanding of photonics is assumed, but no computational or programming experience is needed. Description: Inverse design in photonics has been one of the hot topics in academia in the last decade. The term generally refers to the use of efficient optimization methods to explore a large space of tunable parameters and create devices that vastly outperform conventional designs. Inverse design has also come to focus for industry applications due to demonstrations of integrated photonics devices that are significantly smaller and more efficient than their traditional counterparts. This has been further strengthened by the progress in enacting fabrication constraints that make optimized designs compatible with foundry fabrication specifications. This course will explain the fundamentals of inverse design, showcase the latest achievements in creating the next generation of photonic devices, and help design engineers with no prior experience add this powerful tool to their arsenal. Learning Outcomes: This course will enable you to: - compare some of the common computational methods used to perform photonic simulations - describe the advantages of the adjoint variable method over other optimization methods - construct from scratch and run FDTD and FDFD simulations of devices commonly used in integrated photonic circuits - distinguish between topology optimization and shape optimization - apply inverse design to optimize a simple component like a mode converter or beam splitter - incorporate fabrication constraints in the inverse design optimization Instructor(s): Weiliang Jin is a senior scientist at Flexcompute Inc., working on the development of the company’s high-performance, hardware-accelerated FDTD solver. During his PhD studies at Princeton University, and postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University, his research focused on computational electromagnetism, and photonic design and optimization of lightsails, nonlinear optics, and fluctuation phenomena. He has co-authored over 30 publications including a popular review paper on inverse design in photonics. Prashanta Kharel is a Technology Strategist at Flexcompute, where he leads partnerships with foundries and helps develop cutting-edge simulation tools for the photonics industry. Dr. Kharel earned his Ph.D. in Physics from Yale University, specializing in nonlinear optics and quantum technologies. In his previous role as Head of Devices and a founding team member at HyperLight, Dr. Kharel worked on commercializing the Thin-Film Lithium Niobate photonics platform for diverse markets, ranging from optical communications to test and measurement. Dr. Kharel has authored over 22 journal articles and holds 13 patents, blending academic insight with industry experience in photonics. Event: SPIE Photonics West 2025 Course Held: 26 January 2025