Integrated photonics based on planar holographic Bragg reflectors

Integrated holographics is a novel photonics technology made possible by recent advances in semiconductor manufacturing technology and planar waveguide fabrication. The technology's corner stone, the holographic Bragg reflector (HBR), is a slab-waveguide based, nanoscale, refractive-index structure that merges, for the first time,,powerful features of holography, such as single-element spectral and spatial signal processing and overlay of multiple structures, with a highly integrated environment. As a building block for photonic circuits, the HBR's holographic signal mapping comprises a unique and novel way of on-chip signal routing and transport that is free-space-like but fully integrated. Signals propagate and overlap freely as they are imaged from active element to active element - an architecture that eliminates the need for constraining electronics-style channel-waveguides and associated space requirements and opens the door to unique integrated photonic circuits of very compact footprint. Photolithographic HBR fabrication was recently demonstrated to provide complete amplitude and phase control over individual HBR diffractive elements thus offering the powerful ability to implement almost arbitrary phase-coherent spectral filtering functions. This is enabling to a broad range of optics-on-a-chip devices including compact multiplexers, tailored passband optical filters, optical switch fabrics, spectral comparators, and correlator-based optical look-up tables.