SBIR Phase I: Silicon Photonic Optical Gyroscope using Planar Waveguide Coil and Integrated Photonics Circuit

Award ID: 2052114

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is improving the safety and reliability of autonomous systems with affordable high-precision instruments. Due to high component cost and extensive manual assembly, improvements in high-precision inertial navigation equipment has traditionally been slow, with system prices actually increasing instead of decreasing as in most other high-technology products. An affordable yet highly accurate gyroscope will open a $10 B market opportunity in autonomous systems applications, and it will provide disruptive, more compact new technology into the $2 B existing high-performance inertial navigation market. Possible market applications include sensors for consumer electronics, automotive safety systems, industrial robots, and national security systems. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop a new 3-D Silicon Nitride bandgap waveguide to enable small, high-precision integrated optical gyroscopes. Traditionally, on-chip Silicon Nitride waveguides are short centimeter length structures with optical loss on the order of a 100 dB per meter making them unsuitable to fabricate long gyroscope waveguides. Gyroscope waveguides typically require a spiraled sensing waveguide greater than 40 meters long to generate the sufficient Sagnac Phase for performant operation. Additionally, there is a trade-off between tight pitch waveguides that fit more sensing area per die, and the errors generated from optical phase coupling between neighboring waveguide spiral tracks. This SBIR will demonstrate a novel 3-D bandgap structure and process methodology to densely pack an ultra-low loss waveguide that will enable an approximate 400x improvement in optical loss and a 4x improvement in waveguide density versus conventional Silicon Nitride waveguide approaches found in todays standard CMOS process. The results of the Phase I is a key-enabling technology for small integrated optical gyroscopes as well as other photonic devices that require low loss on-chip optical waveguides. 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: Peter Atherton