- PhotonForge 2.0 lets engineers & AI agents design photonic chips together, with any AI agent driving entire flow, from schematic to tapeout-ready layout.
- Community edition free with open access to photonics community; unlimited licenses for engineers and AI agents. Offers end-to-end photonic design automation on engineer's machine & connects to Flexcompute's Tidy3D physics solvers.
- Enterprise edition adds support & licenses for foundry PDK integration, EDA connectors, plus traceability & manufacturing readiness for foundry designs.
BOSTON, MA, October 15, 2026 – Flexcompute, the physics company, today released PhotonForge 2.0, an end-to-end design automation platform for photonic integrated circuits (PICs) built for engineers and AI agents to design chips together. Engineers and agents work on the same design, from schematic and layout through circuit simulation, design rule checking (DRC), layout versus schematic (LVS) checking and tapeout, and every design connects directly to Flexcompute's Tidy3D Multiphysics solvers. The Community edition is free for research and commercial use, with unlimited licenses, and runs on the engineer's own machine.
Photonic chips are becoming essential to AI data centers, where near-packaged and co-packaged optics help meet fast-growing bandwidth demands, and AI agents are starting to take on more of the design work. PhotonForge 2.0 is one of the first design platforms built for both engineers and AI agents. Engineers work in a local GUI. Any agent a team already runs connects through the Model Context Protocol (MCP) or a Python API and can drive the entire flow: it places and routes the chip, checks it against the design rules and simulates it. There are no per-agent fees, so a team can run as many agents as the work requires.
“AI agents are changing how photonic chips are designed, and they need two things to be useful: as many licenses as the work takes, and physics they can trust,” said Vera Yang, President and Co-Founder of Flexcompute. “PhotonForge 2.0 gives every engineer and every agent unlimited licenses for free, and connects to Tidy3D Multiphysics whenever they need it.”
Every design is checked against real device physics: Tidy3D runs FDTD, charge, heat and RF simulation on one model of the chip and carries the results up to circuit behavior. PhotonForge also integrates with leading EDA tools for layout, system-level simulation, and verification, allowing users to leverage familiar workflows. Small teams start on a complete flow, and enterprises bring PhotonForge into the flow they already run. As AI designs more of each chip, tracking every revision matters more. PhotonForge ties each design revision to the tapeout and to the data measured back, not just to the final layout sent to the fab.
“This is one of the first times we have built design software for engineers and AI agents at the same time,” said Prashanta Kharel, PhD, Head of Semiconductor Strategy at Flexcompute. “With Community, any team gets the whole design flow on their own machine, and their agents can drive every step of it. As the team grows, the same platform connects to the EDA tools they already use and keeps every revision traceable from design to measured data.”
Availability
PhotonForge 2.0 Community is available today by installing it from PyPI. Flexcompute will demonstrate PhotonForge 2.0 live at its hands-on agentic photonic design workshop on Friday, October 16, in Sunnyvale, California, and the team is also at SEMICON West in San Francisco, October 13–15.
About Flexcompute
Flexcompute is a frontier AI lab building a Physics World Model that bridges data-driven AI and the laws of physics. Founded by researchers from Stanford and MIT, its team of more than 70 PhDs develops GPU-native solvers for fluid dynamics, electromagnetics, structures, and heat. Through Tokenized Physics, Flexcompute builds both neural networks and first-principles physics directly into its Physics World Model. This creates a verification layer that grounds AI predictions in trusted physics and helps engineers and AI agents evaluate how designs will perform before they are built. Engineering teams at more than 250 companies across aerospace, automotive, semiconductors, photonics, and advanced manufacturing use Flexcompute to evaluate, explore, and optimize designs, allowing them to innovate with confidence. Learn more at flexcompute.com.
Media Contact
Silvie Casanova
Flexcompute
silvie.casanova@flexcompute.com
