Developing Plasmonic Logic Devices for Large-Scale Photonic Integrated Circuits
Abstract
Despite the benefits that optics and photonics have brought to improving communications technology, there remains a lack of commercialized optical computing devices and systems, which reduces the benefits of using light as an information-carrying medium. The proposed research will develop architectures and designs of photonic logic gates that can serve as building block components with the ability to be cascaded in arbitrary ways. The goal of the photonic logic gate development is to use the building blocks for creating large-scale photonic logic circuits with complex functionality. Current work in this area has focused on developing often passive single-stage devices, such as logic gates or adders. In order to make these devices commercially viable, work needs to be done to explore how integrated photonic devices can be cascaded in arbitrary ways to allow for more complex circuit design, in turn allowing for a wider variety of information processing functions in the optical domain. This will require modular devices that perform transformative computation in addition to methods to regenerate the encoded signal which will enable cascaded stages. We will focus on demonstrating the viability of plasmonic multi-mode interferometer devices for this purpose, as their fabrication is compatible with standard CMOS processes, they have a small footprint, and they are relatively robust to fabrication tolerances. Inverse design tools will be leveraged to enable non-intuitive device designs with higher performance. In order to demonstrate the power of computing in the optical domain, we will design the devices to operate on phase-encoded signals as opposed to the amplitude-encoded signals typically used. In addition to designing new device architectures, we will utilize compatible plasmonic material systems, such as epsilon-near-zero materials, to develop novel optical regeneration schemes, improving the performance of plasmonic logic devices. Finally, the devices will be demonstrated in a large-scale photonic circuit design.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Mar 07, 2023
- Source ID
- FA95502110188
Entities
People
- Mark C. Harrison
Organizations
- Air Force Office of Scientific Research
- Chapman University
- United States Air Force