Photonic Integrated Circuit Simulator

Photonic integrated circuits route and process light on a chip the way electronic ICs route current: waveguides carry it, directional couplers split and combine it, and voltage-controlled phase shifters steer it. This simulator lays out one such chip from above — an input waveguide side-couples to a ring resonator, then feeds a Mach-Zehnder interferometer with a phase shifter on one arm. Sweep the wavelength to watch the ring's resonance dip pass through the through-port power, adjust the coupling to move between under-, critical and over-coupling, and drive the phase shifter to switch the output between the bar and cross ports — the same mechanism used to modulate data onto light in real silicon photonics.