Integrated nanophotonics: multiscale integration of engineered nanostructures in photonic crystal architectures

消费者对具有日益复杂的应用的新型信息和通信技术的需求继续推动半导体行业实现越来越小和更快的设备。人们正在寻找维持技术增长的新方法，前景看好的方法正接近商业实现。这种增长越来越需要以极快的速度在用户之间、从核心到外围设备的设备内、从芯片到芯片的组件级别上传输海量信息，甚至是在芯片上。目前，全球能源消费中约有2.5%专门用于这一任务，而且这一比例正在迅速增长。热量和电力消耗的问题不再能在纯粹的电子层面上解决。在很长的距离上，我们现在依靠光学解决方案。这项提议将光学解决方案降低到芯片级别。我将与我的研究生和同事团队一起，设计和制造一种全新的超小型激光器，最终与当前和未来几代计算机芯片的电子架构无缝集成。我们将使用被称为纳米线的工程材料作为我们的微激光器的光学活性部分(“增益”)。这是具有电子集成潜力的部分。我们将通过将纳米线包裹在一种名为光子晶体(“腔”)的材料中来实现非常低的功率激光。这是一种工程材料，通过禁止或允许光以特定方式移动来操纵和控制激光系统的光学响应。激光非常小，因为光子晶体只工作在几个光学波长的大小，这是定制光流动的基本限制。通过独立设计实现光学增益和腔响应的材料，我们绕过了当代固态微激光方法的基本制造限制。我们将专注于在光子晶体结构中实现激光，然后努力实现电子集成。由于这种集成将完全通过纳米线，我们预计它将比当代方法快得多，功率要求也低得多。

Consumer demand for novel information and communications technologies with increasingly sophisticated applications continues to drive the semiconductor industry to achieve ever smaller and faster devices. New ways of sustaining this growth in technology are being sought, and promising approaches are nearing commercial realization. This growth increasingly requires moving immense quantities of information extremely rapidly - between users across vast distances, within devices from the core to peripherals, at the component level from chip to chip, or even on the chip. About 2.5% of our global energy consumption is now dedicated to this task, and this fraction is growing rapidly. The problems of heat and power consumption can no longer be solved at the purely electronic level. Over long distances, we now rely on optical solutions. This proposal brings the optical solution down to the chip level. With my team of graduate students and colleagues, I will design and build a fundamentally new kind of ultra-small laser for eventual seamless integration with the electronic architecture of current and future generations of computer chips. We will use engineered materials called nanowires as the optically active part (the "gain") of our microlaser. This is the part with the potential for electronic integration. We will achieve very low power lasing by encasing the nanowires in a material called a photonic crystal (the "cavity"). This is an engineered material that manipulates and controls the laser system's optical response by either forbidding or allowing light to move in certain ways. The laser is extremely small because photonic crystals work at sizes of only a few optical wavelengths, the fundamental limit to tailoring the flow of light. By independently engineering the materials that realize optical gain and cavity response, we have bypassed a fundamental manufacturing constraint of contemporary approaches to solid state microlasing. We will focus on realizing lasing in photonic crystal architectures, and then work toward achieving electronic integration. Because this integration will be solely through the nanowires, we anticipate that it will be far faster and have much lower power requirements than contemporary approaches.