VPIphotonics announces a new release of its simulation and design tools VPIphotonics Design Suite™ 11.1 and VPItoolkit™ QKD 1.7. When used together, they represent a powerful R&D environment for the development of QKD systems based on weak-coherent prepare-and-measure protocols, including co-existence scenarios with classical channels. VPItoolkit™ QKD provides modules for both CV- and DV-QKD including transmitters and receivers, parameter estimation, and secret key rate calculation. The design environment can serve as a test bed for the development and evaluation of various implementation options of QKD systems and sub-systems, such as pulse shaping, signal recovery and filtering, and others. The toolkit offers capabilities for modeling a wide range of component imperfections by inheriting the versatile numerical approach of VPItransmissionMaker™ Optical Systems (part of VPIphotonics Design Suite™), including thermal noise, ADC quantization noise, RIN, phase noise, dark count rates, afterpulsing, dead time, etc. Also, exploiting the powerful model libraries coming with VPItransmissionMaker™ Optical Systems, the toolkit allows to investigate various deteriorate effects such as Raman scattering and cross-talk from classical channels in co-existence scenarios. The in-build sweep and scripting functionality offers a convenient way to optimize simulation parameters such as modulation amplitude, photons per pulse, filter bandwidth, BB84 basis probability, symbol rate, and others. In summary, VPIphotonics Design Suite™ and VPItoolkit™ QKD are valuable design and optimization tools for researchers and engineers working in the area of quantum communications. The foundations for VPItoolkit™ QKD 1.7 have been laid in the Quantum Flagship project UNIQORN.
Links:
https://www.vpiphotonics.com/Tools/QKD/
https://www.vpiphotonics.com/Tools/OpticalSystems/