The ever-increasing performance and efficiency demands on new technologies, such as the upcoming 5G cellular standard and next-generation computing, will necessitate a transformative approach towards electronic hardware design all the way down to the electromagnetics level. Significant progress has been made towards the automation and optimization of circuits, especially digital logic circuits, via computer-aided design techniques. In fact, the advent of digital synthesis, or the automated design of digital circuits by computers, has brought hardware into reality which was previously thought impossible, such as microprocessors with billions of transistors occupying form-factors of a few square-cm and capable of performing billions of mathematical operations per second. Presently, the underlying circuit components of a system are designed separately from the electromagnetic (EM) blocks, often by different engineers or even different institutions altogether. Unfortunately, most EM devices such as antennas, microwave devices, and even nanophotonic devices in photonic integrated circuits must be painstakingly designed manually from the ground up by a human engineer. This process is not only tedious and time-consuming, but also suboptimal and often leaves significant performance gains on the table due to the enormous degrees of freedom available for designing such devices which are impossible for a human to explore. This project aims to tackle these issues by developing an automated synthesis platform for EM devices, analogous in spirit to digital logic synthesis, which will save human engineers significant time spent designing these devices manually and lead to novel, non-intuitive structures. This will be the first generalized synthesis platform which can handle a wide class of devices across the EM spectrum. This research will be complemented by an educational plan which includes the development of a new graduate class, training graduate and undergraduate students in multi-disciplinary fields, and motivating K-12 students to pursue careers in STEM.
Analytical solutions for Maxwell's equations, which describe all EM devices, do not exist except for simple toy problems. This significantly complicates the design of new EM devices and requires heuristic approaches and many time-consuming manual parameter sweeps. Despite the potential for unprecedented performance and time savings, there does not presently exist an automated synthesis framework for general EM devices which can operate with modest computing power. This project will lead to the design of such an automated EM synthesis platform by developing a scripting language to describe arbitrary EM devices in both the optical and radio-frequency regimes, advancing high-speed EM simulation methods based on boundary integral equations to decrease compute time and memory required by several orders of magnitude, and leveraging automated optimization algorithms capable of realizing new devices with little to no human intervention. The long-term goal of the project is to enable even the nonexpert with only modest computing capability, such as a desktop workstation, to design many types of different electromagnetic devices rapidly and efficiently in a matter of minutes to hours.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
