PRISM: Photonics-Informed Inverse Lithography for Manufacturable Inverse-Designed Photonic Integrated Circuits

Summary

arXiv:2602.15762v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: 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.