Nanotechnology Now - Press Release: FDTD Solutions 6.5 Facilitates Thin-Film Solar Cell Design

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Abstract:
FDTD Solutions 6.5 provides enhanced capabilities to easily construct broadband material models and parameterized descriptions of complex nanophotonic devices amenable to systematic study and optimization.

FDTD Solutions 6.5 Facilitates Thin-Film Solar Cell Design

Vancouver, BC Canada | Posted on August 12th, 2009

Lumerical Solutions, Inc. (www.lumerical.com), a provider of nanophotonic design software, today announced the immediate availability of FDTD Solutions Release 6.5. Release 6.5 continues to build on the proprietary framework of earlier releases to model the behaviour of materials of industrial interest over broad wavelength ranges, and incorporates the ability to construct parameterized, hierarchical models of complex nanophotonic devices, including digital image sensors, LED/OLEDs, and thin-film solar cells.

Improving the usability of FDTD Solutions has also been a major focus of the latest release. From a simulation object tree browser to help designers navigate the many constituent elements of a complex design, to a search utility integrated within the FDTD Solutions application that connects the end user to the more than 750 topics housed within the online FDTD Solutions knowledge base, users are increasingly able to access the information they are looking for in an efficient manner.

"Continued demand from our growing customer base for fast, accurate and easily-accessible simulation results has been the main driver behind the release of version 6.5 today," said Dr. James Pond, Lumerical's CTO. "An increasingly flexible approach to designing complex devices and systematically quantifying their performance, combined with tremendous speed improvements afforded by recent releases of new cost-effective processor architectures, makes version 6.5 the most powerful release of FDTD Solutions yet."

Recent innovations by hardware manufacturers have provided large increases in scalable memory bandwidth that benefit suitably designed parallel applications like FDTD Solutions. Processors that incorporate higher-bandwidth DDR3 memory, more available memory channels as with Intel's Nehalem processor architecture, and memory controllers integrated onto processor chips provide significant performance improvements to memory-intensive applications running on multi-core and multiprocessor systems.

"FDTD Solutions running on a new Intel Core i7 processor has provided up to a three-fold speed up of our simulations," according to Magued Boshra Nasr, Ph.D., a Senior Research Scientist at Boston-based solar cell start-up Lightwave Power, Inc. "Lightwave Power is focused on commercializing breakthrough improvements to current solar cells in the form of inexpensive nano-patterned thin films that can improve their efficiency. FDTD Solutions allows us to quantify that improvement, and quickly generate results that agree with our experimental measurements."

Lumerical is now shipping Release 6.5 of FDTD Solutions. Interested parties can download a free, 30-day trial online or learn more about FDTD Solutions by visiting /www.lumerical.com/fdtd.php.

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Todd Kleckner
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