Reconfigurable All Optical Information Processing

The team of MicroXact, Inc. and UCLA proposes to engineer revolutionary nonvolatile reconfigurable plasmonic gates for information processing. The unique approach allows one to program any gate between four different states, thus allowing tremendous opportunities to engineer all-optical Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). The proposed gates can be used in any computing architectures, such as conventional optical processing, or optical cellular automata. Gates modulation is nonvolatile and one can use proposed solution to built reconfigurable memory arrays. The proposed reconfigurable gates, if successfully realized, would allow one to build all-optical information processing engines with unmatched speed, functionality, integration density and low power dissipation. Specifically to the Air Force the proposed solution can provide integrated processing platforms for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and other devices where processing speed and integration density are critical. Reconfigurable plasmonic gates will allow the development of an optical DSP and FPGAs thus permitting innumerable potential applications. In Phase I the team will develop a thorough model, will design 1st Generation logic devices and will validate experimentally key physical processes. In Phase II the team will develop integrated reconfigurable plasmonic gates and will thoroughly test it. In Phase III MicroXact Inc. will commercialize the developed technology. BENEFIT: Proposed technology will result in the number of applications. Proposed reconfigurable plasmonic gates will provide integrated processing platforms for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and other devices where processing speed and integration density are critical. Reconfigurable plasmonic gates will allow the development of an optical DSP and FPGAs for tomorrows high speed networks, and the development of programmable optical logic gates will have innumerable potential applications. More immediate applications include utilizing the base platform, the highly integrated reconfigurable plasmonic switch, as integrated high bandwidth modulators. Ethernet over WDM will be used for packet transport and IP/MPLS/Ethernet will be used for data transport in near future. Optical  FPGAs and DSPsare the main candidates for this technology.)