Nanophotonic Devices and Circuits for Communications

The current optical technology is costly, bulky, fragile in their alignment, and difficult to integrate with electronic systems, both in terms of the fabrication process and in terms of delivery and retrieval of massive volumes of data that the optical elements can process. Our most recent work emphasizes the construction of optical subsystems directly onchip, with the same lithographic tools as the surrounding electronics. Arranged in a regular pattern, subwavelength features act as a metamaterial whose optical properties are controlled by the density and geometry of the pattern and its constituents. We also engineered second order nonlinearities in silicon and constructed composite metal-dielectric-semiconductor resonant gain geometries used to create a new type of nanolasers for chip-scale integration of optical information systems. In the following we describe our most recent work on integrated space-division multiplexing (SDM) for data center optical circuits switching networks.