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gplugins 2.1.5

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GDSFactory plugins

Run simulations with GDSFactory by installing plugins.

  • Device simulators
    • Meshing
    • FDTD
      • Ansys Lumerical
      • tidy3d
      • Luminescent
      • FDTDz
      • MEEP
    • FEM
      • femwell Finite Element Method Solver (heaters, modes, TCAD, RF waveguides).
      • elmer for electrostatic (capacitive) simulations.
      • palace for full-wave driven (S parameter) and electrostatic (capacitive) simulations.
      • ansys Ansys HFSS (eigenmode, driven), Q3D Extractor (capacitance) and 2D Extractor (impedance) through PyAEDT (commercial).
      • comsol COMSOL Multiphysics through MPh: driven CPW S parameters and electrostatic capacitance (commercial).
    • EME
      • meow Eigen Mode Expansion (EME).
    • Mode Solver
      • Tidy3d
      • Femwell
      • MPB
      • EMode Finite Difference Method (FDM) mode solver with EME propagation (commercial).
    • TCAD
      • devsim TCAD device simulator.
  • Circuit simulations
    • sax S-parameter circuit solver.
    • vlsir for parsing GDS-extracted circuit netlists into Cadence Spectre, NgSpice and Xyce Schematic File formats.

Installation

You can install most plugins with:

pip install "gdsfactory[full]" --upgrade

Or list the plugins individually:

pip install "gplugins[devsim,femwell,gmsh,schematic,meow,meshwell,sax,tidy3d]" --upgrade

Or install only the plugins you need. For example:

pip install "gplugins[schematic,femwell,meow,sax,tidy3d]" --upgrade

Non-pip plugins

The following plugins require special installation as they can't be installed with pip:

  • For Meep and MPB you need to use conda or mamba on MacOS, Linux or Windows WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) with conda install pymeep=*=mpi_mpich_* -c conda-forge -y
  • For Elmer, refer to Elmer FEM – Installation for installation or compilation instructions each platform. Gplugins assumes ElmerSolver, ElmerSolver_mpi, and ElmerGrid are available in your PATH environment variable.
  • For Palace, refer to Palace – Installation for compilation instructions using Spack or Singularity. Gplugins assumes palace is available in your PATH environment variable.
  • For Ansys HFSS, Q3D and 2D Extractor, install Ansys Electronics Desktop with a licence. pip install "gplugins[ansys]" adds the PyAEDT client.
  • For COMSOL, install COMSOL Multiphysics with a licence (the RF and Design modules for the driven study and for layouts with holes). pip install "gplugins[comsol]" adds the MPh client.

Installation for contributors

We recommend uv for installing GDSfactory. If you don't already have uv, install with the following command:

# On macOS and Linux.
curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh

# On Windows.
powershell -ExecutionPolicy ByPass -c "irm https://astral.sh/uv/install.ps1 | iex"

-Then you can install gplugins and its dependency groups with:

uv venv --python 3.12
uv sync --extra docs --extra dev # --extra tidy3d --extra femwell ...

Getting started