December 2025 monthly summary for flexcompute teams. Delivered targeted feature enhancements across tidy3d and tidy3d-notebooks that strengthen design workflow, improve export fidelity, and enable hands-on experimentation with inverse design techniques. Key outcomes include: (1) topology optimization workflow enhancements with symmetry functions for the autograd plugin and a priority attribute for TopologyDesignRegion to manage overlapping structures; (2) pixel-exact GDS export option to generate pixel-perfect geometries for custom mediums; (3) a new Jupyter notebook for topology optimization of a waveguide crossing using automatic differentiation and inverse design, enabling rapid exploration of optimized geometries across designs. These contributions translate into faster design iterations, higher fidelity fabrication assets, and expanded experimentation capabilities.

Monthly summary for 2025-11: Delivered a key enhancement to topology optimization in flexcompute/tidy3d by introducing a Smoothed Projection Method, improving gradient continuity and material boundary handling in inverse design workflows. Implementations include edge-case robustness for beta → ∞, resulting in more stable and accurate simulations and better convergence in design optimization. This work increases product value for users performing inverse design by reducing boundary artifacts and enabling more reliable, manufacturable designs.

October 2025 (2025-10) monthly summary for flexcompute/tidy3d. Focused on strengthening CI/CD security, enforcing governance, and modernizing dependencies to improve security, traceability, and developer productivity.