Summary:
A Spanish telecommunications research team has developed and patented a new nanopatterning flexible topology for on-chip photonic metamaterials, which synthesizes a tailorable biaxial crystal with lithographic control over anisotropy and dispersion.It will enable new silicon photonic devices with excellent performance and will make the benefits of on-chip metamaterials available to the wider silicon photonic industry. Licensing or research cooperation is sought with industrial IT partners.
Description:
By periodically patterning waveguides at the subwavelength scale, a wide range of equivalent refractive indexes can be synthesized lithographically on a chip. What is more, with the ability to also engineer dispersion and anisotropy, these metamaterials are enabling completely new design strategies yielding devices with unprecedented performance, including ultra-broadband nanophotonic components, metalenses, polarization management devices or high sensitivity waveguide sensors.
However, to avoid Bragg resonances, subwavelength grating metamaterials often require fabrication resolutions of 100 nm and below at telecom wavelengths. While narrow single-mode subwavelength waveguides can operate with larger periods, for more sophisticated devices implemented in planar waveguides, the required resolutions can be prohibitively small to be fabricated with current wafer-scale fabrication technologies, jeopardizing the broad use of high-performance metamaterial designs in silicon photonic devices.
To overcome this limitation, researchers from a Spanish university specialized in the field of Telecommunications have developed a new topology of nanostructured waveguide: the bricked subwavelength grating waveguide, capable of synthetizing artificial anisotropic homogeneous materials with lithographic control over anisotropy and dispersion, while allowing larger minimum feature sizes.
They propose a new topology of nanostructured waveguide. This new pattern only needs one single etch step and makes use of a Manhattan-like geometry, with a uniform grid and pixel dimensions as large as 150×150 nm2 for telecom wavelengths, thereby paving the way towards wafer-scale fabrication. The control over the metamaterial optical properties enabled by bricked subwavelength grating waveguide opens new avenues for designing silicon photonics integrated circuits with exceptional performance and high fabrication yield.
The invention could have a huge impact on all applications that make use of integrated optical technology: transceivers for long-distance and short-distance high-bandwidth optical communications in data centers, photonic biosensors, environmental sensors, spectrometers or systems LIDAR (Laser Imaging Detection And Ranging).
This innovation will not only enable new silicon photonic devices with excellent performance but also (and more important), it will likely make the benefits of on-chip metamaterials available to the wider silicon photonics industry.
The team is looking for an industrial IT partner for implementing and commercializing the technology via license agreement worldwide or alternatively research cooperation to explore jointly new possibilities in the field of Telecommunications.
Type (e.g. company, R&D institution…), field of industry and Role of Partner Sought:
The team is looking for an industrial IT partner.
The industrial partner would obtain patent rights as a licensee to commercialize the technology at an international level.
Research cooperation agreement is also sought for joint exploration of new possibilities under research & development projects.
Stage of Development:
Under development/lab tested
Comments Regarding Stage of Development:
The technology has only been experimentally tested in the research laboratories for the next purposes:
1) Modal transition between conventional photonic waveguides and bricked subwavelength grating waveguides.
2) 90-degree power splitter.
3) Polarization beam splitter.
4) Polarization insensitive power splitter.
All of them use the bricked sub-wavelength grating periodic waveguides, the main object of the invention.
Therefore, the research team have validated the dispersion engineering allowed by bricked SWG ((Surface-wave waveguides) metamaterials by designing on-chip beam-splitters with pixel size dimensions as large as 150 × 150 nm2 that cover bandwidths in excess of 400 nm at telecom wavelength with sub-decibel insertion losses and imbalance. These results have been experimentally demonstrated in a 140 nm bandwidth, which is limited by their measurement setup. In the near future they hope to expand the portfolio to polarization agnostic devices, fiber-to-chip grating couplers, polarization beam splitters, 90-degree optical hybrids for coherent receivers, or ultra-high sensitivity photonic biosensors, among others.
IPR Status:
Patent(s) applied for but not yet granted
Comments Regarding IPR Status:
A Spanish patent has been recently filed, with the possibility to extend the protection worldwide.
External code:
TOES20210519003
