SBIR Phase I: Nanoscale Hybrid Optical Interconnect Platform

Award ID: 2423362

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 todays 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.

NSF Program Director: Ela Mirowski