Optimization Strategies for Photonic Inverse Design (Invited Paper)

Photonic inverse design (PID) has rapidly transitioned from a predominantly academic pursuit to a mainstream methodology for engineering advanced photonic devices. In this presentation, we highlight recent advancements in PID leveraging both GPU-accelerated finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) simulations and the angular spectrum method (ASM). We present comparative analyses of various optimization strategies, examining the trade-offs between traditional second-order techniques such as L-BFGS and more accessible first-order methods like ADAM.