PRISM: Photonics-Informed Inverse Lithography for Manufacturable Inverse-Designed Photonic Integrated Circuits
For photonic circuit designers, PRISM addresses the critical manufacturability bottleneck of inverse-designed components, enabling scalable and high-yield deployment.
PRISM introduces a photonics-informed inverse lithography workflow that bridges the gap between simulated and fabricated performance of inverse-designed photonic integrated circuits, boosting post-fabrication performance and yield while reducing calibration area and turnaround time across multiple fabrication processes.
Recent advances in photonic inverse design have demonstrated the ability to automatically synthesize compact, high-performance photonic components that surpass conventional, hand-designed structures, offering a promising path toward scalable and functionality-rich photonic hardware. However, the practical deployment of inverse-designed PICs is bottlenecked by manufacturability: their irregular, subwavelength geometries are highly sensitive to fabrication variations, leading to large performance degradation, low yield, and a persistent gap between simulated optimality and fabricated performance. Unlike electronics, photonics lacks a systematic, flexible mask optimization flow. Fabrication deviations in photonic components cause large optical response drift and compounding error in cascaded circuits, while calibrating fabrication models remains costly and expertise-heavy, often requiring repeated fabrication cycles that are inaccessible to most designers. To bridge this gap, we introduce PRISM, a photonics-informed inverse lithography workflow that makes photonic mask optimization data-efficient, reliable, and optics-informed. PRISM (i) synthesizes compact, informative calibration patterns to minimize required fabrication data, (ii) trains a physics-grounded differentiable fabrication model, enabling gradient-based optimization, and (iii) performs photonics-informed inverse mask optimization that prioritizes performance-critical features beyond geometry matching. Across multiple inverse-designed components with both electron-beam lithography and deep ultra-violet photolithography processes, PRISM significantly boosts post-fabrication performance and yield while reducing calibration area and turnaround time, enabling and democratizing manufacturable and high-yield inverse-designed photonic hardware at scale.