Silicon-Based Nanomembrane Photonic and Electronic Components

This proposal deals with advanced design architectures for realizing silicon-based reconfigurable and stackable photonic analog signal processing engines supported on flexible or flat substrates using crystalline Si-based nanomembrane technology. Silicon nanomembranes are single crystals of Si that have been released from SOI substrates and redeposited on foreign flexible or flat substrates enabling the best features of different materials. Although they are in fact single crystals and posses the electronic properties of bulk silicon, they are flexible, deformable, and conformable. Fabrication of 3D structures is also possible by multiple transfers and stacking of nanomembranes opening a wide variety of possible device designs and applications. We propose reconfigurable, stackable, nanophotonic silicon based optical processing units that can be fabricated with silicon nanomembrane technology along with the necessary optical routing network architectures. Unit cell arrays will perform basic optical processing functionalities including filtering, switching, modulation and sensing and flat or flexible foreign substrates. BENEFIT: Signal filtering, multi-Gbit/s A/D converters, frequency converters and mixers, signal correlators, and beam formers for phased arrays, modulator, sensor, switches, low loss dielectric waveguides, flexible intelligent photonics, adaptive frequency selective photonics components