Evaluation of Self-Collimated Beams in Photonic Crystals for Optical Interconnect

Abstract—Self-collimated beams and photonic bandgap mirrors in photonic crystals are evaluated for applicability in an on-chip interconnect system. Simulations using the plane-wave expansion and finite-difference time-domain methods are utilized to design and evaluate the theoretical performance of these systems, called a virtual waveguide due to borderless confinement of the signal. The effect of systematic and random fabrication errors on the perfor-mance is characterized. Coupling efficiency is virtually unaffected by misalignment, but is found to be a strong function of the length of the waveguide and the frequency of light. Additional routing ca-pabilities of sharp 90 turns and signal crossings with no crosstalk are demonstrated. Photonic crystal virtual waveguides are ideal structures for on-chip optical signal routing. Index Terms—Integrated optics, optical interconnect, photonic bandgap, photonic crystals, self-collimation. I