From trendy gadgets to large industrial robots, minuscule electronic microchips power the many smart machines we use in our daily lives. Replacing electrons with light to create photonic circuits, however, could bring these chips to new heights.
When the team tested the new nanochain waveguide, they found that the propagation loss had been reduced to between 0.1 and 0.3 dB/mm—far lower than their previous prototypes, and comparable to conventional single mode silicon waveguides. The team also introduced raindrop-shaped optical couplers that shunt light into narrower nanoparticles, further reducing the losses associated with inserting or extracting light from the nanochain waveguide.
“A nanochain waveguide consists of a chain of identical silicon nanoparticles specially engineered to resonate at a particular frequency of light and guide the light,” explained Thomas Ang, a Scientist at A*STAR’s Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC) who performed simulations for this study.
The A*STAR-affiliated researchers contributing to this research are from the Institute of Materials Research and Engineering (IMRE) and the Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC).
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A*STAR Research.