ARCHITECTURE OF AN INTEGRATED COMPUTER-AIDED-DESIGN SYSTEM FOR OPTOELECTRONICS

To design and package optoelectronic (OE) systems more effectively, co mputer-aided design (CAD) systems are needed in the engineering enviro nment. The use of CAD systems for designing electronic computing syste ms is well accepted by the electronic community. CAD systems for engin eering optical design are also widely used in the optics community. Ho wever, design automation of OE engineering requires more than the exis ting tools for system component design. Also required is research on O E design methodology and a complete set of tools. We explore a new are a that will be important to OE system design: OE system CAD. We presen t an integrated CAD system for free-space optical interconnected optoe lectronics that leverages on existing CAD technologies. The details of the system and the guidelines for developing compatible tools are des cribed. Case studies of two OE CAD tools developed using these guideli nes are also presented.