Lumerical Solutions Introduces FDTD Solutions Release 6.5

Lumerical Solutions, Inc., a provider of nanophotonic design software, has announced the availability of FDTD Solutions Release 6.5.

 

According to the company, this new solution empowers device and components designers to confront challenging optical design problems. It incorporates the ability to construct parameterized, hierarchical models of complex nanophotonic devices, including digital image sensors, LED/OLEDs, and thin-film solar cells.

 

It also helps designers to navigate constituent elements of a complex design and to a search utility integrated within the FDTD Solutions application that connects the end user to the more than 750 topics housed within the online FDTD Solutions knowledge base, users are increasingly able to access the information they are looking for in an efficient manner.

 

Dr. James Pond, Lumerical's chief technology officer, said that continued demand from their growing customer base for fast, accurate and easily-accessible simulation results has been the main driver behind the release.

 

"An increasingly flexible approach to designing complex devices and systematically quantifying their performance, combined with tremendous speed improvements afforded by recent releases of new cost-effective processor architectures, makes version 6.5 the most powerful release of FDTD Solutions yet," Pond said in a statement.

 

According to the company, FDTD Solutions works best when incorporated with higher-bandwidth DDR3 memory, more available memory channels as with Intel's (News - Alert) Nehalem processor architecture, and memory controllers integrated onto processor chips. These combinations provide significant performance improvements to memory-intensive applications running on multi-core and multiprocessor systems.

 

Also, the new parameterization capabilities of FDTD Solutions Release 6.5 will help researchers better understand how key parameters impact design performance.

 

"In our work designing plasmonic light trapping layers for silicon solar cells, we have recently shown that a silver nanoparticle array located on the back surface of a silicon solar cell can enhance light trapping near the silicon band edge where collection efficiency normally degrades," said Dr. Fiona J. Beck, a candidate at the Centre for Sustainable Energy Systems at the Australian National University, in a statement.

 

The company is currently shipping Release 6.5 of FDTD Solutions. Those interested can also download a free, 30-day trial from company Web site.