SBIR-STTR Award

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project positions a stepping stone in the chasm between fundamental new physics insights relating to the structure of matter and an aggressive approach to commercializing "Semiconductors of Light" in emerging markets which include photonic integrated circuits (PICs) for high density optical interconnects. Prior assumptions that periodicity was essential to forming the photonic band gaps (PBGs) necessary to create "Semiconductors of Light" have recently been proven false. New structures, characterized by suppressed density fluctuations (hyperuniformity), include disordered structures that exhibit photonic band gaps which are isotropic. This loosens layout constraints and reduces fabrication tolerances for PBG PICs relative to "Semiconductors of Light" based on photonic crystals. Research objectives include the use of hyperuniformly disordered PBGs in the design of PBG-based PIC modulators. This research will leverage entirely new classes of both symmetric and asymmetric resonant light defect structures in a new kind of designer dielectric capable of isotropic light control. Anticipated technical results include higher-performance optical modulators for photonic integrated circuits providing improvements in wavelength density per unity chip area, reduced energy requirements, and improved fabrication tolerance. The broader impact/commercial potential of this project is to apply a newly-discovered structure of solid matter to the elimination of bandwidth bottlenecks that might otherwise constrain the growth of cloud computing business models and threaten continued free availability to the public of increasingly advanced network services. The $3.3B optical interconnect market projected for 2015 will include a rapidly-growing family of high-density optical transceivers priced for datacenter applications operating at rates of 400 Gb/s and beyond. Market entry will require a disruptive rather than just an incremental technological improvement. Commercialization of photonic integrated circuits based on newly-discovered hyperuniformly disordered structures (HUDS) disrupts the current trend toward photonic integrated circuits (PICs) made with silicon photonics microring resonators (MRRs) because HUDS-enabled PBG resonant structures are ~100x smaller in chip area than MRRs. The smaller volume of PBG resonant structures relative to MRRs has been shown to enable lower energy per bit modulation. Finally, HUDs-enabled PBG PICs are expected to be less sensitive to temperature than MRRs. These advantages of HUDS-enabled PBG PICs, along with the improved fabrication tolerance, layout flexibility, and isotropy of HUDS, promise to provide lower cost, more compact, and more energy-efficient optical transceivers for networking equipment and data center markets.

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project is to allow the Internet infrastructure to keep up with explosive growth demand. A core aspect of Internet operational viability is switching speed of optical devices at various points of the transmission, storage, calculation, and access chain. Current technologies are not poised to be able to meet the speed and stability needs of the projected growth in Internet data volumes and access speed requirements. These are currently growing well beyond a Moore's Law pace. Needed is a disruptive approach to optical switching that will allow data management to keep pace with market needs. Ability to delivery this essential capability will provide not only essential international leadership in internet services, but also avail companies involved in the innovation to make a substantial commercial impact directly for their shareholders and to those of their partners and affiliates. This Small Business Innovation Research phase II project is an effort to cross the chasm between fundamental new physics insights relating to the structure of matter and an aggressive approach to commercializing 'Semiconductors of Light' in an emerging market for high density optical interconnects priced for datacenters. Until recently, the only known photonic bandgap solids were photonic crystal structures consisting of regularly repeating, orderly lattices of dielectric materials. It was generally assumed that crystal order was essential to have photonic bandgaps. This longstanding assumption is now known to be false. New photonic bandgap structures, characterized by suppressed density fluctuations (hyperuniformity), include disordered structures that are isotropic. This means that light propagates the same way through the photonic solid independent of direction (which is impossible for a photonic crystal). While the layout of waveguides in conventional photonic crystal and quasi crystal photonic bandgap materials is tightly-constrained to follow characteristic crystal axes, the layout rules for hyper uniform disordered solid waveguides have no such fundamental constraints. The universal protocol and highly-efficient computational framework covering the full range of photonic crystal, quasi crystal , and hyper uniform disordered solid-based photonic bandgaps will be generalized to a broad class of critically important photonic components by the application of a powerful new gradient-free optimization methods.