Design and simulation of plasmonic interference-based majority gate

• Main Authors: Jonas Doevenspeck, Odysseas Zografos, Surya Gurunarayanan, R. Lauwereins, P. Raghavan, B. Sorée
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: AIP Publishing LLC 2017-06-01
• Series: AIP Advances
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4989817

Major obstacles in current CMOS technology, such as the interconnect bottleneck and thermal heat management, can be overcome by employing subwavelength-scaled light in plasmonic waveguides and devices. In this work, a plasmonic structure that implements the majority (MAJ) gate function is designed and thoroughly studied through simulations. The structure consists of three merging waveguides, serving as the MAJ gate inputs. The information of the logic signals is encoded in the phase of transmitted surface plasmon polaritons (SPP). SPPs are excited at all three inputs and the phase of the output SPP is determined by the MAJ of the input phases. The operating dimensions are identified and the functionality is verified for all input combinations. This is the first reported simulation of a plasmonic MAJ gate and thus contributes to the field of optical computing at the nanoscale.