Electrically driven monolithic subwavelength plasmonic interconnect circuits

In the post-Moore era, an electrically driven monolithic optoelectronic integrated circuit (OEIC) fabricated from a single material is pursued globally to enable the construction of wafer-scale compact computing systems with powerful processing capabilities and low-power consumption. We report a monolithic plasmonic interconnect circuit (PIC) consisting of a photovoltaic (PV) cascading detector, Au-strip waveguides, and electrically driven surface plasmon polariton (SPP) sources. These components are fabricated from carbon nanotubes (CNTs) via a CMOS(complementary metal-oxide semi-conductor)-compatible doping-free technique in the same feature size, which can be reduced to deep-subwavelength scale (similar to lambda/7 to lambda/95, lambda = 1340 nm) compared with the 14-nm technique node. An OEIC could potentially be configured as a repeater for data transport because of its photovoltaic operation mode to transform SPP energy directly into electricity to drive subsequent electronic circuits. Moreover, chip-scale throughput capability has also been demonstrated by fabricating a 20 x 20 PIC array on a 10 mm x 10 mm wafer. Tailoring photonics for monolithic integration with electronics beyond the diffraction limit opens a new era of chip-level nanoscale electronic-photonic systems, introducing a new path to innovate toward much faster, smaller, and cheaper computing frameworks.