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Plasmonic PICs

What is a PIC and what are the problems today?

Plasmonic PICs

Visualization of a combination of monolitically integrated photonic building blocks

A photonic integrated circuit (PIC) is a chip that performs optical signal processing. For communications, sensing, automotive and many more, PICs are central to the current and future applications. As the digital transformation is essential to every part of society, demand for PICs will increase. Just as it is possible to produce a chip with millions of transistors on it, it is possible to produce a chip with thousands of photonic devices to control and manipulate light. Equipped with the right building blocks, such chips will deliver a significant boost to countless challenges, including:

  • Today’s PICs cannot yet deliver the performance (speed, size, and efficiency) required for the upcoming applications, such as 6G, automotive LiDAR, consumer healthcare, artificial intelligence (AI), optical computing, virtual reality (VR), and augmented reality (AR).
  • PICs are based on complex technological processes, so that they do not yet reach acceptable reliability, scale, and costs.
  • Many building blocks are still in ther infancy, so that photonic systems on chips (SoCs) are not yet a viable alternative for their electronic counterparts.

How does a plasmonic PIC address these challenges?

Polariton offers plasmonic PICs featuring the following game changers:

  • A technology that is inherently 10x faster (500 GHz), 500x smaller (µm scale) and uses 10x less energy (fJ/bit) than conventional PIC technologies thanks to the underlying physical effects.
  • Seamlessly integrates into silicon photonics which produces at large scale and with advanced fabrication facilities.
  • Developing industry-competitive building blocks which are combined into complex circuits and enabling photonic SoCs by adding further innovative functionality.