Acute-Angled Tip Rounding in Photonic Integrated Circuit Design
Find Innovative SolutionsGenerate Solutions
Solution Overview
Problem
Photonic integrated circuit designs often feature sharp angles that violate design rules, leading to defects in manufactured parts, and manual adjustments are time-consuming.
Innovation Solution
A method involving inverting a design layer to create inverse polygons and performing a rounding operation on acute corners to increase their effective radius, while leaving other corners unchanged, using a sizing function to modify the design and avoid affecting optical characteristics.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Manufacturing precision
If manual rounding of sharp angles is performed, then design rule violations are reduced, but time consumption increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system automatically performs the rounding operation without requiring manual intervention. The computer-executed instructions process the design data and generate rounded corners autonomously, eliminating the need for manual adjustment while ensuring design rule compliance.
Solution Approach 2:
The manual mechanical process of rounding sharp angles is replaced by an automated computational process. The system uses computer-executed instructions to calculate and generate rounded corner geometries, substituting manual drawing or editing actions with automated algorithmic processing.
2Reliability
If individual sharp angles are rounded manually, then manufacturing defects are reduced, but productivity decreases
Solution Approach 1:
Multiple individual rounding operations are merged into a single automated process. The system processes all sharp angles in a design simultaneously through automated instruction execution, rather than requiring separate manual operations for each corner, thereby improving productivity while maintaining reliability.
Solution Approach 2:
The system performs self-service by automatically identifying and rounding all sharp angles without requiring user intervention. The automated instructions process the entire design data structure to generate compliant geometries, maintaining high reliability while significantly improving throughput.
3Manufacturing precision
If rounding operation increases effective radius of acute corners, then design rule compliance improves, but optical characteristics may be affected
Solution Approach 1:
The rounding operation applies different treatments to different corners based on their specific properties. Acute corners are rounded to satisfy design rules, while obtuse corners remain unchanged. This selective local modification ensures manufacturing compliance without unnecessarily altering features that would affect optical characteristics.
Solution Approach 2:
The system changes the geometric parameters (corner radius) selectively based on the angle type. By increasing the effective radius only for acute corners and leaving obtuse corners unchanged, the system achieves design rule compliance while minimizing impact on optical characteristics that depend on specific geometric parameters.
Data Source
AI summary
A system and method for adjusting the shapes of polygons in a design. In some embodiments, the method includes inverting a first layer of the design, the first layer comprising one or more polygons, the inverting of the first layer forming a region complementary to the union of the polygons of the first layer, and including one or more inverse polygons. The method may further include performing a rounding operation on a first corner of a first inverse polygon of the one or more inverse polygons, to form a modified polygon.