ASPIC has a powerful CAD board that allows to build every passive optical circuit starting from the elementary components available in its library, without any restriction in dimensions and complexity. ASPIC models the behavior of many classical integrated optical components with their scattering matrices, therefore the knowledge of both structure and materials of the components is not necessary. Matrices are assembled in a single large sparse matrix according to the topology of the circuit and then inverted to find the complex optical field in each node of the circuit. These ports are the only observable points of the circuits, where forward and backward waves are defined. Instability and ill-conditioning are eliminated with a powerful scheme of variables reduction.

Users can perform simulations in the frequency domain and calculates complex optical field at each node of the circuit or only at external nodes. Parameters can be scanned or randomly varied to take into account technological process tolerances.

Simulation results can be analyzed with APLOT, a powerful graphic environment for data processing where users can view optical power, phase, delay group and chromatic dispersion in every node of the circuit and both polarizations. Data can be processed with ASPIC or exported to other software such as MATLAB and Mask Engineer (by Phoenix).