Performance Analysis and Evaluation of Photonic Waveguides for Multiprocessor Communications

Abstract

After dominating the electronics industry for decades, silicon is on the verge of becoming the material of choice for the photonics industry: the traditional stronghold of III–V semiconductors. Stimulated by a series of recent breakthroughs and propelled by increasing investments by governments and the private sector, silicon photonics is now the most active discipline within the field of integrated optics. This paper provides an overview of the state of the art in silicon photonics and outlines challenges that must be overcome before largescale commercialization can occur. In particular, for realization of integration with CMOS very large scale integration (VLSI), silicon photonics must be compatible with the economics of silicon manufacturing and must operate within thermal constraints of VLSI chips. The impact of silicon photonics will reach beyond optical communication—its traditionally anticipated application. Silicon has excellent linear and nonlinear optical properties in the midwave infrared (IR) spectrum. These properties, along with silicon’s excellent thermal conductivity and optical damage threshold, open up the possibility for a new class of mid-IR photonic devices. Photonic band gap (PBG) materials are periodic dielectric structures that forbid propagation of electromagnetic waves in a certain frequency range. They are able to engineer the most fundamental properties of electromagnetic waves, such as the laws of refraction, diffraction and emission of light from atoms. Such PBG materials not only open up a variety of possible applications, but also give rise to new physics. Unlike electronic micro-cavity, optical waveguides in a PBG microchip can simultaneously conduct hundreds of wavelength channels of information in a three-dimensional circuit path. The thesis starts with the numerical modeling techniques for modeling as well as simulation of photonic crystal designs are introduced. The modeling techniques include finite difference time domain (FDTD) method and Plane Wave Expansion (PWE) method. The FDTD method has been represented in context to modal and polarization properties of the photonic design and PWE method has been represented in context to band gap analysis of the designed photonic structure. [IV] Then a short review of Photonic band gap crystals as well as the some essential basics of photonic crystal fibers material modeling and then proceeds to a discussion on the guiding mechanism including modified total internal reflection and photonic band gap guidance are reviewed. The main properties of solid core PCFs that includes dispersion tailoring, ultra high nonlinearities, birefringent features are being studied. A short review of the loss mechanisms is also presented. The FDTD modeling of photonic crystal waveguide in different materials is done by taking the rectangular lattice waveguide structure and dielectric material of user defined constant refractive index. The default material is taken to be air with unit refractive index. The FDTD simulation and analyses of modeled crystal is done that presents the reflectance and transmittance properties of the photonic band gap crystal-the electric and magnetic field component for transverse electric polarization and the poynting vector also. The band gap analysis for the modeled photonic crystal is done by PWE method by taking a same tolerance factor for all the materials simulations and thus band gaps are located and analyzed.