AI agents for photonic integrated circuit design automation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We present photonics intelligent design and optimization, a proof-of-concept multi-agent framework that converts natural-language photonic integrated circuit (PIC) design requests into layout mask files. This work demonstrates end-to-end PIC design automation using large language models (LLMs), with the goal of achieving structurally valid rather than performance-qualified layouts. We compare seven reasoning LLMs using a testbench of 102 design descriptions that ranged from single devices to 112-component PICs. The success rate for single-device designs was up to 91%. For design queries with ≤15 components, o1, Gemini-2.5-pro, and Claude Opus 4 achieved the highest end-to-end pass@5 success rates of ∼57%, with Gemini-2.5-pro requiring the fewest output tokens and the lowest cost. Future work will extend this framework toward performance qualification through expanded datasets, tighter simulation and optimization loops, and fabrication feedback integration.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".