Toward Ultra-Dense Integrated Plasmonic Circuits

Continuing demands for increased compute efficiency and communication bandwidth have led to the development of novel interconnect technologies with the potential to outperform conventional electrical interconnects. Nowadays, optical communication with passive photonic waveguides which supports GHz data rate and multiple communication channels (WDM) has been widely applied in large scale optical net-works in order to improve the energy efficiency. However, due to the intrinsic properties of light such as diffraction limit and adjacent crosstalk, the passive photonic waveguide is still hard to be densely integrated on-chip on the footprint aspect comparing with electronic wires. This also further limits the adaptation of high performance optical devices and still makes the conventional electronics communication network hard to beat in the on-chip level. For active devices such as modulators, this means fulfilling optical switching operations within light propagation distances of just a few wavelengths. In this proposal Dr. Dalir from Omega Optics Inc. in collaboration with University of Texas at Austin propose a photonics integrated circuit for ultrafast- sensing and switching based on ultra-dense packaging.