Release notes IPKISS Photonics Design Platform 3.9.0

The IPKISS Photonics Design Platform 3.9 is the first release to support Python 3. To ensure a gradual transition path to users, we also release IPKISS 3.9.0 for Python 2. There are no API changes to IPKISS (except for a few small deprecations), so once your code is compatible with the Python 3 syntax it should run fine on the latest IPKISS 3.9.0 py3 release.

This release also contains many bugfixes, and several improvements that increase the overall stability of the software. There are also several improvements to IP Manager that help you improve the quality of your PDKs and libraries, and our new touchstone exporter helps you to store S-parameters in a standardized format. A full list of changes can be found in the changelog.

Python 3

IPKISS 3.9.0 is available for both Python 2 and Python 3. To ensure a smooth transition to Python 3, we put together this guide to help you migrate: IPKISS Python 3 porting guide.

IPKISS 3.9 is the last IPKISS release to officially support Python 2. With any future releases, new functionality in IPKISS will be released only for Python 3 and only critical bugfixes will still be fixed also in Python 2. The main reason behind this decision is that in Python 3, we can benefit from many excellent packages that are not supported on Python 2 anymore.

We strongly recommend that you migrate to IPKISS 3.9.0 py3.

If you encounter any difficulties while transitioning from Python 2 to Python 3, do not hesitate to reach out to our support team and we will be glad to help!

IPKISS IP Manager stability

In order for the user to make the most out of IPKISS IP Manager, a number of improvements have been made which enhances the reproducibility and consistency of the output files across different OS platforms and versions of Python.

Touchstone exporter

With this release, we have introduced a new exporter in IPKISS that allows the user to generate touchstone files from given S-parameters: to_touchstone. This makes it easier to store simulation results in a standardized way. This way they can be used in either other tools that support it, or loaded again in IPKISS to visualize at a later moment (without having to resimulate).