PLATON aims to be the first project that will realize Tb/s optical routing fabrics for optical interconnects in backplanes and BladeServers adopting plasmonics as its disruptive technological vehicle. Application of surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) in nanophotonics is rapidly emerging as an effective means to guide and manipulate optical signals on subwavelength scale and below the diffraction limit of light. PLATON will exploit SPPs to develop the first ultra-compact Dielectric Loaded Surface Plasmon Polariton (DLSPP) switches capable to route real data for BladeServer and backplane optical interconnects with very small footprint (<15x40 µm2), consuming very low powers (<15mW) and exhibiting negligible latency lower than 250fsec. PLATON will use these switches as building blocks on a CMOS compatible SOI optical integration board to merge plasmonics, silicon nanophotonics and electronic ICs. As such PLATON will ideally blend the small size and low power switching capabilities of plasmonics with the low loss of silicon and processing capacity of electronics, to provide miniaturized and power efficient, Tb/s photonic interconnect routers for ultra-performance data communications. Towards fulfilling its goals, PLATON’s objectives include:

Two high-capacity routing prototypes will be developed in order to prove the high-throughput and enhanced functionality of the plasmonics/photonics platform and to assess and verify the feasibility of the concept in scale: