Nanoscale, Commercially viable, Field Programmable Photonic Device Arrays

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This proposal describes research aimed at developing a platform for nanoscale, commercially viable, optoelectronic devices to form the basis of field programmable photonic device arrays. The platform promises to provide unprecedented capabilities and performance metrics for applications in the domains of tele- as well as data-communications, computing and on-chip sensing.*******Through judicious design, along with the utilization of recent discoveries reported by my group, plasmonic losses can be nearly eliminated, leaving us with plasmonic structures which only suffer from other loss mechanisms such as scattering and leakage. This in turn allows one to design optoelectronic devices that have nanometer scale dimensions in all 3 degrees of freedom with area, power consumption, bandwidth, operating wavelength range and insertion losses which surpass their all-dielectric counterparts such as Si-photonic circuits.*******The question that merits answering is whether these improvements fulfill unmet demands and would fuel a surge in optoelectronic functionality, utility and market share. An important example is one which relates to data communications in emerging generations of high-speed integrated circuits: interconnect latency and power consumption have become prominent bottlenecks in data routing and processing. To alleviate these limitations, optical communications based on photonic circuits and devices are integrated into conventional electronic platforms to take advantage of the high information bandwidth that the former can provide. In particular, silicon photonics have emerged as one of the major platforms in optoelectronics integration due to its relative fabrication compatibility with mature CMOS processing within a monolithic chip. However, dielectric waveguides such as silicon guide light via total internal reflection, and thus minimizing physical dimensions and increasing the integration density are restricted by diffraction limit and cross-coupling .*******The complex permitivity of metals at optical frequencies lead to significant losses, limiting propagation lengths to a few microns before power is attenuated below detectable levels. Due to these losses, it seems that plasmonic modes may never outperform their all-dielectric counterparts to transport light between different points despite of its potential to address many of the existing challenges encountered in Si photonics. However, if these losses are reduced beyond a certain level, through cancellation of the field in the metal layers rather than removing the field away from the metal layers, plasmonic modes may provide the optimum medium to accommodate truly nano-scale structures in all three dimensions, empowering these structures to challenge the performance and dominance of the all-dielectric Si platform used for the active and passive devices at present.******