Photonic topological optimization (TO) is the inverse design process of refining a material’s structure to achieve optimal light manipulation and performance characteristics for specific photonic applications. Driven by advancements in computing and fabrication technologies, TO has emerged as a powerful framework for accelerating the design process in multivariable design by enabling the creation of photonic structures that simultaneously meet multiple criteria and constraints. In this work, B. Martinez de Aguirre Jokisch and coauthors report a TO framework for designing high-performance thermo-optical phase shifters (TOPS). The control of the phase of light is a pivotal operation to enable a diverse range of applications such as optical transceivers, light ranging and detection, quantum information processing, and neural networks, to name a few. Therefore, TOPS should fulfill optimal performance in terms of low optical loss, power consumption, speed, footprint, and fabrication complexity to enable large-scale implementation for such applications. Optimization of all these characteristics is not achievable using typical design procedures based on parameter scanning. Hence, using such a versatile TO framework, the authors report efficient TOPS outperforming state-of-the-art designs. Moreover, the presented TO framework can handle fabrication limitations, such as minimum feature size, and can be expanded to solve other problems, thereby paving the way for applying topology optimization to a broader range of inverse design problems in nanophotonics.

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