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

Description

Ziva’s proposed Ultra Nonlinear Plasmonics (TALON) technology addresses the critical DoD need to miniaturize tunable and non-linear photonic, on-chip components and devices. Ziva’s TALON modulator exploits composite metamaterials both for its waveguide section cladding layers and for the non-linear interaction sections. The former effectively reduces the propagation loss of TALON’s ultra-confined plasmonic waveguides. This key feature enables significantly more compact overall footprints, without incurring the insertion loss penalty characteristic of conventional metal-insulator-metal plasmonic waveguide approaches. Separately, a composite metamaterial core for the nonlinear segment provides large magnitude, effective, non-linear refractive index characteristics. This second key TALON feature reduces the required interaction length for modulation. TALON technology enables the realization of micron-scale optical devices such as light amplitude modulators with minimum insertion losses. A unique swarm optimization approach for composite material design preserves wideband device operation. Ziva’s proposed TALON technology promises to enable on-chip photonic components and devices, which are CMOS-compatible and of the same dimensions as electronic devices. The TALON approach offers a key path to continue scaling future computation, communication, sensing and imaging devices.