Formal Analysis of Optical Waveguides in HOL

Optical systems are becoming increasingly important as they tend to resolve many bottlenecks in the present age communications and electronics. Some common examples include their usage to meet high capacity link demands in communication systems and to overcome the performance limitations of metal interconnect in silicon chips. Though, the inability to efficiently analyze optical systems using traditional analysis approaches, due to the continuous nature of optics, somewhat limits their application, specially in safety-critical applications. In order to overcome this limitation, we propose to formally analyze optical systems using a higher-order-logic theorem prover (HOL). As a first step in this endeavor, we formally analyze eigenvalues for planar optical waveguides, which are some of the most fundamental components in optical devices. For the formalization, we have utilized the mathematical concepts of differentiation of piecewise functions and one-sided limits of functions. In order to illustrate the practical effectiveness of our results, we present the formal analysis of a planar asymmetric waveguide.