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PLaSK (Photonic Laser Simulation Kit) 2025.12.02 is a cross-platform finite-element solver developed by the Photonics Group at Łódź University of Technology for the numerical investigation of charge, heat, and electromagnetic transport in photonic components. Originally conceived to model edge-emitting and vertical-cavity semiconductor lasers, the package now spans thirty public releases and equally supports transistors, light-emitting diodes, photodetectors, waveguides, and integrated photonic circuits, making it a single environment for studying optical, electrical, and thermal interactions within a shared geometry. Users construct device layouts through Python-driven scripting or the built-in geometry editor, assign material properties from an expandable database of III-V, nitride, and silicon compounds, and launch steady-state, small-signal, or time-domain solvers that self-consistently couple Poisson, drift-diffusion, heat-flow, and vectorial Helmholtz equations. Advanced features include strained quantum-well and quantum-dot gain computations, optical mode analysis with perfectly-matched layers, thermal lensing, spontaneous and stimulated recombination, as well as extraction of L-I-V curves, near- and far-field patterns, and modulation response up to multi-gigahertz frequencies. Typical applications range from optimizing ridge-waveguide laser thresholds, beam quality, and self-heating in datacom transceivers to simulating photocurrent and bandwidth of avalanche photodiodes for LiDAR receivers, evaluating transistor breakdown, or predicting thermal crosstalk in densely packed photonic integrated circuits. The program exports results in HDF5, VTK, and CSV formats for further processing in MATLAB, Python, or ParaView, while parametric sweeps and machine-learning extensions enable automated design exploration. PLaSK is available for free on get.nero.com, where downloads are furnished through trusted Windows package sources such as winget, always supplying the latest 2025.12.02 build and supporting batch installation of multiple applications.
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