ZIVA CORPORATION — Department of Defense SBIR Phase II: SB173-002

Description

Ziva’s proposed Ultra nonlinear Plasmonics (TALON) technology addresses the critical DoD need to miniaturize on chip tunable and non-linear photonic components and devices. Ziva’s TALON based modulator exploits metamaterial based, composite materials for the waveguide section cladding layers and for the non-linear interaction sections. Using metamaterial based composite cladding layers for the linear waveguide sections, TALON effectively reduced the propagation loss of ultra-confined plasmonic waveguides. This enables significantly more compact overall footprints without incurring the insertion loss penalty characteristic of conventional MIM waveguide based approaches. In addition, the metamaterial based non-linear sections reduce the interaction length. This reduction is achieved because the propagating mode interacts, with a composite non-linear core material possessing large magnitude, effective, non-linear refractive index characteristics. Ziva’s proposed, CMOS compatible, TALON technology exploits the use of metamaterial based, nanostructured, composite materials for the linear waveguide section cladding layers and non-linear core sections to enable the realization of micron-scale optical devices such as light amplitude modulators with minimum insertion losses. TALON technology promises to enable on-chip photonic components and devices which are CMOS compatible and of the same dimensions as electronic devices to continue to scale future computation, communication, sensing and imaging devices.