Running the MQW solver is similar to running the other simulations in Ansys Lumerical Multiphysics™. Depending on the number of wells the MQW solver calculation may take a long time. The UI may become unresponsive during the calculation.
Resource Configuration
When running the MQW solver in a parameter sweep, multiple simulations can be run in parallel with Concurrent Parametric Computing. The number of simultaneous MQW solver simulations to run is controlled by Capacity in the Resource Configuration.
Since version 2026 R1.4 MQW also uses multithreading to improve the performance of the solver itself. Multithreading is applied over three parallelizable dimensions: the transverse wave vector, quantum well partitions, and lateral MQW slices. The more of these parallelizable dimensions an application uses the more speedup is expected. At least every application will have multiple transverse wave vectors. The multithreading feature applies to both the standalone MQW and coupled MQW/CHARGE simulations. Some existing examples are:
- Multi-Quantum Well (MQW) Edge Emitting Laser that uses multiple transverse wavevectors.
- Micro-LED that uses multiple transverse wavevectors and 10 QW partitions enabling even more parallelization.
To enable multithreading, set Threads in the Resource Configuration window. Typical speedups at 16 threads are 4x-8x, with higher speedups occurring if there are more parallelizable dimensions. The underlaying eigenvalue problem solved within each parallelizable dimension in MQW is not multithreaded due to its relatively small size not benefiting from multiple threads.
Running the Solver
To run the MQW solver:
- (Optional) Visualize the MQW stack band diagram by clicking the Band Diagram button on the Layers tab of the Edit MQW Gain Solver
- (Optional) Configure resources.
- Close the Edit MQW Gain Solver window and click the Run button on the MQW tab of the main window of the Finite Element IDE to run the MQW solver.