photonoxide

Photonics for Rust: validated, fabrication-ready, and visible while it runs.

Mode solvers, FDFD, FDTD, semi-analytic methods, inverse design, layout and PDKs, in one library, with a studio to watch every simulation and optimization live.

🚧 Alpha. 0.1 Foundations is released: units, materials with their sources, layer stacks, run records, the validation harness and the studio window. The solvers come next; see the roadmap, and share your ideas in the issues.

cargo add photonoxide                               # the library
cargo install photonoxide --features studio         # the photonoxide command, with the studio window

Why photonoxide?

Open-source photonics has excellent individual tools, each in its own corner:

Meep for FDTD, MPB for band structures and S4 for RCWA;
Ceviche and SPINS for inverse design;
KLayout for layout.

Rust has oxiphoton, which is broad but has no GUI, and its README shows no comparison with published results. photonoxide aims to be one coherent toolkit with three things none of them combine:

Validated: every solver checked against analytic solutions, published devices and established codes, with the results in a public report. Every reported number carries its convergence.
Fabricable: foundry design rules inside the optimization, and a tape-out package ready for a multi-project wafer run: GDSII or OASIS on the foundry's layers, DRC and connectivity checked, test structures included, and performance reported across process variation. The first target is SiEPIC openEBL, where photonoxide designs will be fabricated and measured.
Visible: a native studio that shows fields propagating, modes, layouts and optimizations as they run. The CLI and the studio run the same job, and every run replays.

And underneath:

Pure Rust: no C, Fortran or Python dependencies, from the linear algebra to the GDS writer. There are no Python bindings.
Fast: parallel on the CPU, with a GPU backend for FDTD.
Reproducible: the same input gives the same result on any number of threads.
Inverse design built in: adjoint gradients for every solver, density and level-set methods, robust and length-scale constraints. The optimizers come from genoxide, our optimization library, which grows the general methods photonoxide needs.

Status

Milestone	Scope	Status
0.1 Foundations	Units, materials with provenance, geometry, run records, studio skeleton, validation harness	✅ released
0.2 Mode solvers	Slab, full-vector 2D finite differences, EIM, bends, dispersion	🔜 next
0.3 FDFD	2D and 3D, mode ports, S-parameters, adjoints	planned
0.4 FDTD	2D and 3D Yee, CPML, subpixel smoothing, dispersive media, GPU	planned
0.5 Semi-analytic	TMM, RCWA, eigenmode expansion, BPM	planned
0.6 Inverse design	Adjoint topology and shape optimization, fabrication constraints, the 2D-to-3D pipeline	planned
0.7 Layout and PDK	GDSII and OASIS, parametric cells, routing, DRC, SiEPIC EBeam and Cornerstone	planned
0.8 Tape-out	Submission packages, test structures, sign-off, openEBL and Cornerstone runs, measurements back	planned
0.9 Fabrication realism	Process variation, lithography proxies, corners, yield	planned
0.10 Circuits and devices	S-parameter circuits, compact models, a validated device library	planned
0.11 – 0.13	Photonic crystals, metasurfaces, plasmonics, nonlinear and fiber optics, multiphysics, quantum	planned
1.0	Stable API and the published validation report	planned

The details are in ROADMAP.md.

Validation

Every solver is validated on three tiers before it ships:

Analytic solutions: Fresnel, slab modes, Mie scattering, Bragg stacks, PML theory.
Cross-code: Meep, MPB, S4, Ceviche and oxiphoton on the same structures.
Published devices: inverse-designed demultiplexers, beamsplitters and grating couplers, reproduced in 3D.

Each result states its tolerance, grid and source. The current report is docs/validation.md, written by photonoxide validate and checked by CI.

Contributing

photonoxide is at the design stage, which is the best time to shape it. Open an issue for ideas, use cases or validation cases you'd like to see.

License

Licensed under either of Apache License, Version 2.0 or MIT license at your option.