October 11, 2005 Ottawa, Ontario -- Optiwave Systems has announced the availability of OptiFDTD 6.0, which the company says represents a major upgrade to the professional industry standard used for the design and simulation of advanced passive and non-linear photonic components. According to the company, OptiFDTD 6.0 is a robust simulation package providing advanced modeling capabilities to meet the complex design needs of photonics and bio-photonics engineers.
"OptiFDTD 6.0 is a comprehensive design suite which includes a number of new features valuable to the photonics research community," contends Richard Zhang, senior research scientist at Optiwave. "In light of the growing interest in using the Finite- Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) method for the design and application of photonic crystals, components, and nano-devices, more research scientists will choose to use OptiFDTD as their simulation environment of choice."
According to the company, new features in OptiFDTD 6.0 include the ability to assign point sources in a design environment and facilitate symmetric or periodic layouts using the Periodic Boundary Condition. Also, the company says the software's enhanced automation features allow users to create their own custom scripts and execute time-saving operations, allowing them to fully optimize their simulations.
"We believe the next major advances in photonics and bio-photonics research will be accomplished using the FDTD method," says Jan Jakubczyk, president and CEO of Optiwave. "The FDTD method is an exceptionally versatile and accurate photonics modeling technique which is further enhanced through the new OptiFDTD 6.0 user environment. Users will have the flexibility to fully automate complex simulations, and dynamically monitor post-simulation data without sacrificing crucial CPU power. This is our strongest release to date."