February 1, 2008 — Acceleware Corp., which develops high performance computing (HPC) applications, and semiconductor software designer Synopsys Inc., has released a new product that, according to the companies, enables up to 20-times faster electromagnetic simulation of micro-optoelectronic devices such as micro image sensors based on CMOS technology.

The product, which links Synopsys’ TCAD Sentaurus Device simulation software and Acceleware’s ClusterInABox Quad Q30 workstation, enables an order-of-magnitude speed-up of the high accuracy finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) electromagnetic modeling algorithm used in Sentaurus Device, according to the partners.

In the rapidly growing micro-optoelectronics market, manufacturers are under constant pressure to produce higher performance devices in a shorter time. For example, CMOS-based image sensors, which are used widely in camera phones, webcams, digital cameras, and camcorders, have to pack more pixels into each device generation, as well as be cost-effective to produce. TCAD tools are well-suited for optoelectronics manufacturers designing more sophisticated devices and performing complete characterization of their device structures over a wide range of light incidence angles, lens shapes, pixel sizes, and other factors prior to manufacturing.