CMOS nanophotonics

We proposed recently that the building blocks of metal optics (encompassing plasmonics, metasurfaces, and metamaterials) can be fabricated in existing CMOS foundry processes by repurposing the back-end-of-the-line (BEOL) of the CMOS chip in. We demonstrated a metal-optic liquid crystal modulator using a chip that is fully fabricated in the conventional 65-nm CMOS process. In this talk, we provide an in-depth presentation on the design constrains and post-processing steps required to convert CMOS chips to nano-photonic devices. We will also present recent developments and prospects of CMOS meta-optics and optoelectronics.