SBIR Phase I: Nanoscale Hybrid Optical Interconnect Platform

The broader impact/commercial impacts of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will involve revolutionizing internal computer chip connections, called interconnects, by replacing materials like copper with light-based connections. The high-speed interconnects are the information highways of modern-day computing systems, and, unfortunately, these highways are hitting fundamental peak capacities and interconnects are now a critical limiter to computer system performance. This project will advance photonic integrated circuits and computer interconnects by researching commercialization pathways for a new photonic approach, called coupled hybrid plasmonics (CHP), that uses the interaction of light and metals to squeeze light and devices down to nanometer-scale sizes. Commercialized CHP will potentially enable durable interconnect product advantages in bandwidth, power, area, and cost. The ultimate go-to-market motivation for commercializing CHP is to enable short-distance (meters down to millimeters), all-optical interconnects and replace electronic interconnects in computer systems (e.g., in the multi-trillion-dollar Information Technology and Telecommunications markets). The first commercialization challenge for CHP is to develop a manufacturing flow that uses mainstream processing. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will bridge the gap between CHP principles and industrial manufacturing. The primary challenge this project faces is that the CHP effect requires a new multi-layer stack – metals, dielectrics, and semiconductors – that does not exist today in mainstream silicon-photonics/semiconductor chip manufacturing facilities. Industrial CHP manufacturing recipes and device architectures are the gateway to future proof-of-concept prototypes and then products. The project will employ industry-standard simulation and modeling tools to rapidly design and evaluate candidate CHP recipes, devices, and circuits. It will quantitatively benchmark CHP devices and transceivers against today’s state-of-the-art silicon photonic circuits (e.g., ring-resonator based) and assess candidates based on the bandwidth, area, and energy consumption they achieve. The overall project goal is to create preliminary industrial manufacturing recipes and a design-library of CHP-based devices and transceiver circuits. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.