Large-Scale Simulation for Optical Propagation in 3-D Photonic Crystal Using the FDTD Method With Parallel Processing

In this paper, optical propagation in a 3-D photonic crystal optical waveguide is simulated numerically using the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method. Since the division number of the analysis domain increases to model the structure of the photonic crystal precisely, huge memory is required, and it takes much time to solve the problem. Furthermore, using the micron-order wavelength needs a much larger division number. Therefore, we apply to this problem parallel processing using a PC cluster not only to speed up but also to gather memories in each node. We simulated the optical waveguide made of the 3-D photonic crystal using a parallelized FDTD method, and our results show that parallel processing is an effective approach for reducing the calculation time and expanding the analysis domain