A new protective metamaterial "cladding" has been developed that prevents light from leaking out of the curvy pathways it would travel in a computer chip.
Processing information with light can be more efficient than with electrons used in current devices, but light and the information it carries tend to leak and scatter out of the tiny components that would be used on a chip.
A novel cladding, called waveguides, has been designed to prevent leaks - particularly around sharp bends where light bounces off track and scatters.
Developed by a team of scientists from Purdue University the cladding prevents information from getting lost and could facilitate the integration of photonic with electric circuitry, increasing communication speed and reducing power consumption.
"We want the bits of information that we are sending in the waveguide to travel along tight bends and simultaneously not be lost as heat," said Assistant Professor Zubin Jacob of Purdue University.
According to the team from Purdue, the waveguide cladding is unique as through anisotropy it is able to let light to travel at different velocities in different directions. By controlling the anisotropy of the cladding, the researchers say they have been able to prevent light from leaking off track into other waveguides where ‘crosstalk,’ or mixing, of information would occur. Instead, bits of information carried by light bounce off by ‘total internal reflection’ and stay strongly confined within a waveguide.
"The waveguide we made is an extreme skin-depth structure, which means that any leakage that does happen will be really small," said Saman Jahani, Purdue graduate research assistant in electrical and computer engineering. "This approach can pave the way for dense photonic integration on a computer chip without worrying about light leakage."