Installation¶

PICwriter is tested on python versions 2.7, 3.4, 3.5, and 3.6 on Linux, OS X, and Windows. Please check here for the current build status (if building from source).

Requirements¶

A working version of python is required for using the PICwriter library. You can go to python.org to download python (or check if it’s installed on your computer by running python --version in a command prompt or terminal. I personally recommend downloading Anaconda since it includes several nice scientific libraries, the conda package manager, Spyder IDE, and other niceties.

Installation (Linux / OS X)¶

(Option 1 – preferred) Install PICwriter by first downloading the source code here. and then in the picwriter directory run:

python setup.py install

(Option 2:) Install PICwriter by running:

pip install picwriter

Installation (Windows)¶

The best way of obtaining the library is by installing the prebuilt binaries.

First, go to the gdspy appveyor project page, then click the python environment that matches your python version and processor type. For example, if you have a 64-bit processor with Python version 3.5 (you can check by running python –version in a command prompt) then you would click ‘PYTHON=C:Python35-x64’. Then, click the Artifacts tab and download the corresponding distgdspy-1.X.X.X.whl wheel file.
Open up a command prompt (type cmd in the search bar), navigate to your downloads, then install the appropriate .whl file via:
```
pip install gdspy-1.X.X.X.whl
```
Next, install the PICwriter library by following the same procedure as before at the picwriter appveyor page to install the corresponding prebuilt picwriter .whl file.
In a command prompt, navigate to your downloads and install the appropriate .whl file with pip:
```
pip install picwriter-1.X.X.X.whl
```

Building from source is also possible. For installing gdspy, an appropriate build environment is required for compilation of the C extension modules.

Simulations with PICwriter¶

In order to use the built-in PICwriter simulation functions, it is necessary to download and build MEEP and MPB (the free and open-source software packages for electromagnetic simulation that PICwriter calls). Currently, this functionality is only tested on Ubuntu 16.04, but should work fine for any UNIX environment. For the FDTD functionality, it is necessary for MEEP and MPB to be built from source (so that they can be linked together for importing eigenmode sources). Below is a downloadable script that I use to install and build MEEP/MPB from source: build_meep_python_parallel.sh.

Please see the section Simulations with PICwriter for information and tutorials for simulating PICwriter components.

Getting Started¶

You can check that PICwriter and gdspy are properly installed by running:

import gdspy
import picwriter

in a python file or python prompt. To get a feel for using the PICwriter library, checkout the Tutorial page.