Spoof Surface Plasmon Polariton based THz Circuitry

Abstract:

Continual aggressive scaling of CMOS technology has pushed Moore's Law at the edge of device shrinking era, thereby imposing insurmountable roadblocks for accruing further advancement in electronic device speed, system bandwidth, and reduced energy dissipation. There are very few scalable and competing semiconductor technologies that can be readily harnessed to meet the ever-growing demands for large data processing and transmission. Photonics, on the other hand, presents a seemingly promising solution to some of the above challenges. Due to the smaller path delay and much higher bandwidth, photonic circuits and networks have attracted enormous research interest in the recent years. For example, photonic logic has been implemented by coding the Boolean information in the amplitude, phase or wavelength of the optical signals. However, the key element to address the fundamental deficiencies of CMOS circuits and optical implementations remains missing. The attempt to use optical frequencies has plagued with numerous shortcomings such as dimension mismatch between optical and electrical components, lack of coherent detection, inflexibility, susceptibility to mechanical and environmental variations, and the presence of bulky optical. Confronted by these difficult problems, THz band, generally considered to be the 300 GHz – 10 THz in the electromagnetic spectrum, has been deemed as a transitional frequency range that can potentially bridge the disparity between the electronic (microwave) and optical parts of the spectrum. This talk is directed toward studying the properties of sub-wavelength meta-material structures and application of these properties in designing THz systems with complex functionality. The work seeks to establish a connection between applications traditionally implemented using CMOS technologies and advanced techniques of manipulations of the electromagnetic field using spoof surface plasmon polariton (SSPP)