Additive manufacturing of high-index photonic circuits

ABSTRACT:Modern electronic and opto-electronic devices are predicated on controlled deposition and patterning of functional material layers (e.g. semiconductors, conductors, and dielectrics). Vacuum epitaxy and chemical vapor deposition, in conjunction with lithographic methods, have dominated the manufacture of these systems. While these techniques are well-established and routinely deliver reliable and excellent performance, they are expensive to operate and maintain and are relegated to the processing of rigid, planar substrates. New integrated optics and photonics technologies stand to benefit from transitioning the successes of vacuum thin film deposition and lithographic patterning to a mass-producible, conformable optoelectronic device manufacturing platform. Critical to this transformation will be the ability to use low-cost conventional printing technologies to pattern precursors of active-layer materials (e.g. semiconductors with high refractive indices) onto a variety of substrates and subsequently consolidate the precursors into photonic circuit components (waveguides, splitters, modulators, amplifiers, filters) and electro-optical devices (energy harvesting devices, conformal antennas, infrared emitter, sensor arrays, etc.). To enable high-throughput, low-cost manufacturing of photonic circuitry, Nanohmics, Inc., working in collaboration with industrial and academic partners, have formulated a class of high-refractive-index-material inks and developed methods for in-line, direct-write printing and consolidation of the inks into photonic circuit components on large-area, continuous webs.BENEFIT:The proposed method form factor is amenable to a number of distributed sensor network applications including chemical- monitoring, where Nanohmics has identified a current unmet need in the industrial safety monitoring market. In addition to the possibility of producing a printed, conformal chemical sensor measurement device, the inks and sintering techniques developed under this program will enable a large number of other optically-active elements including arrayed waveguide gratings, printed microemitters and detectors, photonic crystals, lasing elements, and other gas- and liquid-phase optical sensors.The primary goal of the work effort is the development of low-cost methods for producing precursor inks and subsequently sintering them into impactful photonic circuits.