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Lumotive is developing solid-state lidar using metamaterials and needed to simulate designs at the nanoscale on large areas to validate performance. They used Ansys Lumerical FDTD on AWS to model liquid crystal metasurfaces, allowing them to simulate designs distributed across many cores and reducing the design cycle time by two orders of magnitude. Lumerical's Python API also helped optimize designs dependent on process parameters within accurate simulations. This scalable and cost-effective solution from Lumerical validated Lumotive's metasurface design and allowed them to deliver their product on schedule.

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44 views3 pages

Lumotive-Cs-31 0 23

Lumotive is developing solid-state lidar using metamaterials and needed to simulate designs at the nanoscale on large areas to validate performance. They used Ansys Lumerical FDTD on AWS to model liquid crystal metasurfaces, allowing them to simulate designs distributed across many cores and reducing the design cycle time by two orders of magnitude. Lumerical's Python API also helped optimize designs dependent on process parameters within accurate simulations. This scalable and cost-effective solution from Lumerical validated Lumotive's metasurface design and allowed them to deliver their product on schedule.

Uploaded by

NH Kim
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Ansys + Lumotive

“We designed every nanometer of this metasurface using Ansys


Lumerical FDTD, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Python API
while making it compatible with CMOS fabrication tolerances.
Lumerical’s AWS solution allowed Lumotive to scale its design
cycle by two to three orders of magnitude without additional
cost or accuracy compromises.”

Prasad Iyer
Senior Lidar Engineer / Lumotive
CASE ST UDY

/ Business Need

Lumotive is an innovative startup developing solid-state lidar for the automotive industry based on revolutionary beam-steering technology
that leverages semiconductor chips designed using metamaterials and enables lidar systems to achieve compact size at low cost. Lumotive’s
goal is to revolutionize perception systems in the emerging self-driving car industry.

Lumotive’s lidar products are based on their advanced beam steering technology using liquid crystal metasurfaces (LCMs). Their LCM
technology was designed and optimized with Ansys Lumerical FDTD on AWS. Lumotive’s innovation provides a clear step forward from the
relatively immature state of beam-steering technology based on LCMs. To achieve success in developing their lidar systems, they needed the
ability to quickly and accurately model and validate the beam-steering performance of their LCM design. The most important requirement
was an efficient method for predicting anisotropic permittivity and the response of the liquid crystal at the nanometer scale.

Lumotive’s primary challenge when simulating LCM performance was the


requirement to model large-area optics while including the nanoscale
features representing CMOS process variations. Specifically, they needed
to capture optical properties at a macro-scale length (> 100 µm) with
nanoscale (< 5 nm) precision. This requirement created significant
computational complexity for Lumotive. Their on-premise computing
resource proved insufficient, so they set out for a new solution for their
simulation needs.

/ Lumerical’s HPC Solution on AWS EC2

Lumotive considered several HPC solutions to accelerate large-scale


simulations, but in the end, they decided to go with a cloud solution on
Amazon Web Services (AWS) powered by Ansys Lumerical FDTD. This
decision was driven by the accuracy and run-time performance of Lumerical
FDTD coupled with its amenability to HPC and the cost-effective flexibility of
Amazon’s cloud solution.

Lumotive was able to achieve their aggressive design goals with a custom
workflow developed with the support of Lumerical. Lumerical’s Python API
was an essential part of this custom flow to achieve runtime scalability and
the interoperability needed for Lumotive to exploit the open-source tools
necessary for optimization and post-processing. Prasad Iyer from Lumotive
Figure 1. A liquid crystal metasurface developed by
says, “We designed every nanometer of this metasurface using Ansys
Lumotive with Ansys Lumerical FDTD on AWS.
Lumerical FDTD, AWS, and Python API while making it compatible with
CMOS fabrication tolerances.”

AWS provides a secure, resizable computing capacity with an easy-to-use web interface. It offers a convenient way to buy compute time on
demand and makes it possible to access multiple large servers, paying only for the actual time used. Such flexibility is attractive to Lumotive
as they require massive computing resources for only a short duration during the development cycle. Further, due to the flexibility of
Lumerical FDTD, jobs can be greatly sped up by running large simulations using several servers concurrently. The cost is similar to running on
one server for a longer period.

High-performing Ansys Lumerical FDTD works seamlessly with EC2 and can be launched in minutes. Only a few steps are needed to
launch a typical FDTD simulation, including the creation of a virtual private cloud, the activation of security and license management, and
the definition of a launch template. A cost-effective solution runs an Ansys Lumerical FDTD engine on Amazon Linux without a graphical
interface. Simulation files are stored in S3 to remove the need for costly transfers to and from the cloud.

3D PRINTING CORPORATION OPTIMIZES ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING / 2


/ Results

With the help of Lumerical’s HPC solution, Lumotive rapidly scaled their simulations to AWS. The ability for individual simulations of
Lumerical FDTD to be distributed across many computing cores provided extremely high levels of parallelism. This rapid scaling allowed
Lumotive to reduce their design time by two orders of magnitude without compromising on accuracy. Previous simulations running on their
workstations that would take hours now finished in minutes.

In addition to improving the performance of their simulations, workflow improvements made possible by Lumerical’s Python API were
critical for Lumotive to optimize designs that were dependent on many independent process parameters and constraints. The Python API
further enabled Lumotive to make use of state-of-the-art open-source optimization algorithms to maximize the performance of the LCM
while maintaining highly accurate simulations.

Lumerical’s HPC using AWS provided Lumotive with a solution that is scalable, cost effective, and flexible. Lumotive was able to confirm the
correct functionality of its LCM, allowing them to deliver their product on time. Without Lumerical’s solution, this level of validation would
not have been possible, as the runtime on conventional hardware would be unreasonably long. Further, the cost of procuring dedicated
hardware would not be justifiable for a task needed only intermittently for a small portion of the design cycle.

Lumotive’s Iyer says, “Lumerical’s AWS solution allowed Lumotive to scale its design cycle by two to three orders of magnitude without
additional cost or accuracy compromises.”

ANSYS, Inc. When visionary companies need to know how their world-changing ideas will perform,
Southpointe they close the gap between design and reality with Ansys simulation. For more than 50
2600 Ansys Drive years, Ansys software has enabled innovators across industries to push boundaries by
Canonsburg, PA 15317 using the predictive power of simulation. From sustainable transportation to advanced
U.S.A. semiconductors, from satellite systems to life-saving medical devices, the next great
724-746-3304 leaps in human advancement will be powered by Ansys.
ansysinfo@ansys.com
Ansys and any and all ANSYS, Inc. brand, product, service and feature names, logos and
slogans are registered trademarks or trademarks of ANSYS, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the
United States or other countries. All other brand, product, service and feature names or
trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Visit www.ansys.com for more information.

©2023 ANSYS, Inc. All rights reserved.

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