Confronting the hard problems in integrated photonic design and simulation

Despite tremendous progress in the integrated photonics ecosystem over recent years, and the commercial success of many products, there remain some important challenges and opportunities. We discuss some of the key simulation challenges related to the design, simulation, and optimization of advanced components such as lasers, isolators, and novel passive components created with photonic inverse design methods. We also discuss system level simulation challenges such as handling spatial correlations when performing statistical analysis and dealing with thermal management.