Toward Ultra-Dense Integrated Plasmonic Circuits

The call for increased situational awareness has led to the development of a sea-of-sensors, designed to provide real-time data from the battlefield. However, innovation in battlefield data management has been slow to catch up and is now on the verge of being crippled by a contested electromagnetic spectrum. To this end, Dr. Hamed Dalir from Omega Optics Inc. in collaboration with Prof. Ray T. Chen from University of Texas at Austin and Prof. Volker J. Sorger from George Washington University propose to develop an ultra-wideband RF-photonic preprocessing system capable of sensor-fusion and machine-learning classification with at-least 10x capacity gain over current systems. In Phase I, our team have demonstrated key individual components such as: (1) a graphene photodetector in a plasmonic slot waveguide only 15 nm-wide enabling an gain-bandwidth improvement of 3-orders of magnitude, (2) a 2x2 optical switch with 50 attojoule-per-bit and operation speed of > 150 of GHz with merely 100 mV drive voltage, (3) a plasmonic MZI with a world-record low VpL of 0.01 Vmm, and (4) and a polarization independent multi-arm bow-tie antenna covering 53-80 GHz range. Phase II, will focus on integration of the whole system as well as further optimization of the individual parts.