PHEMTRONICS CONCEPT

Information transfer by optical means is highly desirable because of almost unlimited bandwidth and the ability to multiplex. Yet, issues of residual cross-talk and the speed of photons make it very challenging to capture them in a compact device. Additionally, phase change materials (PCMs) currently used for integrated optics thus far overwhelmingly lack the capability of broad active tunability.

​The PHEMTRONICS vision surpasses current paradigms at 4 levels:

• 1st level Phase-Change Material (PCM): It surpasses the current paradigm of PCM by developing extreme broadband transparent O-PCMs that combine broadband low loss (0.4 – 18.5 µm) and large optical contrast (Dn ~ 2)

• 2nd level: active reconfigurable plasmonic platform: It surpasses the current paradigm of passive using dynamically reconfigurable nanoantennas, and therefore active phase change plasmonics.

 

• 3rd level: device: it surpasses the current paradigms of speed and energy, targeting for the phase transition a few fJ of energy for solid-to-solid structural transformations occurring at the femto-sec scale.

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• 4th level: technology: it surpasses the current paradigm of the infrared frequency regime; Ge2Sb2Te5 (GST) is limited to telecom and nearly impractical for RF applications, while PHEMTRONICS enables broadband reconfigurable technologies towards RF-compatible and optical frequencies.