Optiwave announces new photonics design tool

Optiwave Systems Inc., a provider of software design tools for photonics, recently released its OptiFDTD MAX, which is powered by EM Photonics' Celerity acceleration technology, yielding the computation power of a 25 to 50 node PC cluster.

With the OptiFDTD MAX, said the press release, Optiwave is pioneering complex Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) simulations with a desktop hardware/software solution that offers an affordable alternative to expensive and cumbersome cluster computing networks.

Complemented by the company's OptiFDTD software suite, this workstation creates a commercially available desktop solution for running FDTD simulations at high-performance computer speeds.

"OptiFDTD MAX equips photonics and biophotonics engineers with cutting edge technology never commercially available until today," said Jan Jakubczyk, CEO and President of Optiwave Systems.

OptiFDTD MAX will be used primarily for the design and simulation of advanced passive and non-linear photonic components. Richard Zhang, product manager of OptiFDTD MAX, commented, "Simulations which normally took a week to complete will be finished in hours."