Limits on Integration as Determined by Power Dissipation and Signal-to-Noise Ratio in Loss-Compensated Photonic Integrated Circuits Based on Metal/Quantum-Dot Materials

We analyze the power dissipation that is associated with using the gain of an embedded medium (quantum dots) to overcome the losses inherent in plasmonics systems employed to produce a negative dielectric constant for nanophotonics circuits. This power dissipation is primarily due to the dissipative losses in the metal structures and Auger recombination in the quantum dots. The impact of amplifier mediated signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) degradation and its effect on integration is analyzed, and a tradeoff between low power dissipation and SNR is quantified.