Experiment

Experiments, or automated testing procedures, are at the core of what AutoGator is built to do.

An Experiment is a class that encapsulates all the information needed to test a single circuit from a GDS file. AutoGator provides a base experiment that defines the required functions and attributes that must be overridden for an experiment, but it is up to the user to implement their own actual experiment procedure. AutoGator's examples do provide some basic experiments that can be used as starting points as you tailor build custom experiments. If the basic experiments provide enough functionality for you, all the better.

In addition to Experiments, there is the concept of an ExperimentRunner. This object allows you to group a number of Circuit objects together and run the same experiment procedure on all of them. This is useful for testing a large number of circuits in a single run. Since AutoGator has stage calibration functionality, the researcher can theoretically begin an ExperimentRunner and let the data collection happen autonomously, without supervision, as the test procedure can include an optimization over each Circuit before performing the data collection routine.

AutoGator uses a text file format to know about what circuits are available to it (including a listing of all GDS coordinates). This file, represented by the CircuitMap class, can filter circuits by user-defined parameters. The CircuitMap format is:

(<GDSx>,<GDSy>) [<param1>=<value1>, <param2>=<value2>, ...]

Note

Note that < > denotes a required field, [ ] denotes optional fields.

Warning

All parameters are parsed as strings. So, even if your text file contains floats or boolean-like values, you must use strings to filter them.

Because of AutoGator's filtering capabilities, a single text file can contain a complete listing of all circuits on a die. The user may assign to each circuit a parameter that defines, for example, the port ordering of lasers and detectors for each circuit, supposing in this case that the circuit port ordering is not consistent across the entire chip. This parameter may then be used to group all circuits with matching configurations together to be collectively passed to some Experiment class. Custom experiments can be written that operate on only a subset of circuits, such as those with the same port configuration, the ExperimentRunner can be passed that filtered CircuitMap to enable automated. In this way, physical connections can be made (such as fiber inputs and outputs), one set of automated tests run, a new physical connection configured, and a different set of automated tests run.

See the experiment example for a basic Python implementation.