Miniaturization and Integration of Micro/Nano-Photonic Devices for Optical Printed Circuit Board (O-PCB) and VLSI Photonic Applications

We present, in the form of an overview, some of the results of our study on the miniaturization and integration of micro/nano-photonic devices for optical printed circuit board (O-PCB) and VLSI photonic applications. The micro- and nano-photonic devices are designed to perform the functions of transporting, switching, wavelength filtering, and routing optical signals on flat modular boards or substrates. We have designed micron-scale devices and nanoscale photonic crystal devices of diverse functions for VLSI applications and have fabricated some of them using embossing or imprinting techniques. We also designed and fabricated novel subwavelength nano-scale plasmonic devices. We have constructed and assembled O-PCBs using polymer-based waveguide arrays and circuits and have examined their information handling performances. We have used near-field scanning optical microscopic (NSOM) technique to characterize the fabricated micro/nano-scale photonic materials and devices