Design and simulation tools for optical micro-resonators

Dielectric resonators promise high functionality components for future optoelectronic integrated circuit applications. Accurate modelling of these components is a prerequisite to their successful deployment in innovative configurations. This paper will compare and contrast a wide variety of simulation techniques, developed by ourselves, that can be used for design. These encompass, (1) full wave analytical integral equation methods which yield high accuracy and fast computation but are structure specific, (2) direct numerical simulation based upon high performance finite difference schemes which offer significant flexibility at the cost of computational overheads, (3) fast yet accurate semi-analytical approaches which can often provide sufficiently accurate results for the purposes of practical design at a fraction of the effort, in terms of both computational and pre-processing analysis as required by the former methods.