Figures of merit for passive and active plasmonic circuits

In this talk, using criteria of bandwidth density and energy consumption for signal guiding and processing, we will introduce comprehensive figures of merit for both passive and active plasmonic architectures of various designs, benchmarking their performance for the realisation of high-bandwidth optical data communication in electronic chips. The introduction of broadband optical signals to transfer and process information revolutionized telecommunications. The use of photonic signals now presents a new paradigm for the next generation of microelectronic chips, where data is transmitted across chips as photonic signals instead of electric ones. This approach will enable the simultaneous transfer of hundreds of signal threads encoded in multiple wavelengths along a data line, compared with effectively only one thread in an electronic wire, boosting the data transfer around chips, and leading to a huge rise in their computational power. Presently, it has become a very hot research topic with numerous techniques and designs proposed to achieve efficient plasmonic signal guiding and active control. In this talk. we present a global approach for benchmarking various both passive and active plasmonic-based circuit architectures of various designs, with a particular emphasis on the their integral performance, while revealing the link connecting it to the performance of individual components. A figure of merit (FOM) will be derived for passive plasmonic circuitry on the basis most general and practically relevant considerations of the data traffic and power dissipation densities, which appeared to be related to the standard local waveguide characteristics, such as the bandwidth, signal propagation length and integration parameters. This allows to generalize all previous FOM approaches, particularly revealing a previously overlooked bandwidth factor, and on this basis to benchmark the performance of the main types of plasmonic waveguides. Then, we will introduce an all-inclusive active FOM and will benchmark the performance of photonic or plasmonic-based electro-optical, thermo-optical and all-optical modulators, revealing qualitative advantages of the plasmonic switching approach compared to the best traditional state-of-the-art photonic designs.