Taiwan Semiconductor, Microsoft and Ansys team up to boost simulation of silicon photonic

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (NYSE:TSM), Ansys (NASDAQ:ANSS) and Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) have collaborated to speed-up simulation and analysis of silicon photonic components by over 10 times.

The companies said they achieved over 10X speed-up of Ansys Lumerical FDTD 3D electromagnetic simulation software for photonics simulation using Microsoft Azure NC A100v4-series virtual machines, powered by Nvidia accelerated computing running on Azure AI infrastructure.

The companies noted that, with the scalability of Azure cloud, Ansys software delivers a platform ideal for ushering in the next wave of silicon Photonic Integrated Circuit, or PIC, technology for applications in data communications, biomedical tools, automotive LiDAR systems, and artificial intelligence, or AI.

Silicon PIC, a type of optical communications which enables data to travel farther and faster, is integral to hyperscale data centers and Internet-of-Things, or IoT, applications, according to the companies.

“The size and complexity of our multiphysics silicon solutions makes the process of simulating all possible parameter combinations challenging,” said Stefan Rusu, head of silicon photonics system design at TSM.

Rusu added that collaboration shows that Ansys “effectively harnesses the latest cloud infrastructure and techniques to deliver powerful, predictively accurate solutions that produce results in a fraction of the time.”

“Collaborating with TSMC and Microsoft has accelerated technologies that address high-speed optical data transfer, which is one of the most important chip design challenges today,” said John Lee, vice president and general manager of the semiconductor, electronics, and optics business unit at Ansys.