Speed-up electronic integrated circuits with plasmonic technology

Abstract

This paper proposed to use plasmonic waveguides for on-chip nanoscale optical data transmission. To optically transmit data between electronic devices, plasmonic devices, such as plasmonic sources, modulators, waveguides, switches, filters and detectors are needed. A novel planar hybrid plasmonic waveguide (PHPW), which consists of a low-index stripe sandwiched between a high-index nanowire and a metallic film is reported. A highly confined hybrid mode is formed in the low-index stripe as the result of interaction between photonic mode and plasmonic mode. The combination of the plasmonic and photonic modes across the low-index stripe can simultaneously achieve long propagation length and strong field confinement with high power intensity in the PHPW. The PHPW is based on a planar structure, offering additional degrees of freedoms to design a large variety of high-performance passive and active plasmonic devices such as waveguide bends, waveguide couplers and ring resonators.