In this paper we propose a novel hybrid optical plasmonic Vivaldi antenna for operation in the standard C telecommunication band for wavelengths in the 1550 nm range. The antenna is fed by a silicon waveguide and is designed to have high gain and large bandwidth. The shape of the radiation pattern, with a main lobe along the antenna axis, makes this antenna suitable for point-to-point connections for inter- or intra-chip optical communications. Direct port-to-port short links for different connection distances and in a homogeneous environment have also been simulated to verify, by comparing the results of a full-wave simulation with the Friis transmission equation, the correctness of the antenna parameters obtained via near-to-far field transformation.
Multi-core processors are likely to be a point of no return to meet the unending demand for increasing computational power. Nevertheless, the physical interconnection of many cores might currently represent the bottleneck toward kilo-core architectures. Optical wireless networks on-chip are therefore being considered as promising solutions to overcome the technological limits of wired interconnects. In this work, the spatial properties of the on-chip wireless channel are investigated through a ray tracing approach applied to a layered representation of the chip structure, highlighting the relationship between path loss, antenna positions and radiation properties.
Optical technology applied to on-chip wireless communication is particularly promising to overcome the performance limitations of the state-of-the-art networks on-chip. A key enabling component for such applications is the plasmonic antenna coupled to conventional silicon waveguides, which can guarantee full compatibility with standard optical circuitry. In this paper, we propose an antenna array configuration based on tilted plasmonic Vivaldi antennas coupled to a silicon waveguide. The details of the single antenna and of the array design are reported. The radiation characteristics of the array are suitable for on-chip point-to-point communication, i.e. in-plane maximum gain of 14.70 dB for an array with five antennas. The array exploits a travelling wave feeding scheme and, therefore, is compact in size (about 3.5 µm x 8.7 µm).
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