Plasmonic technology innovation: The chip-to-chip interconnect

This report presents the innovation potential for chip-to-chip plasmonic interconnects and European-funded project NAVOLCHI that aims to fulfill the promise. Plasmonic interconnects are a special kind of optical interconnects, i.e. they utilize the superior bandwidth of light to achieve great speeds of data flow. Plasmonic interconnects may resolve known bottleneck issues in communications, such as the multi-core processor-tomemory bottleneck in the cell phone industry. In addition, the plasmonic elements of the interconnect can be extremely compact, thus bridging the size gap between electronics and silicon photonics. NAVOLCHI utilizes a CMOS-compatible approach that will ensure the cost-effectiveness of the future product. NAVOLCHI, a European Union-funded project, explores, develops and aims to demonstrate a novel nano-scale plasmonic chip-to-chip and system-in-package (SiP) interconnect to overcome the bandwidth, footprint and power consumption limitations of today’s electrical and optical interconnect solutions. Today, electronics is limited in operating speed, while photonics is limited in miniaturization capability. By use of the emerging science of