Polymers for integrated optical interconnects

This is the final report of a three-year, Laboratory-Directed Research and Development (LDRD) project at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). The recent discovery of electroluminescent polymers opens up, for the first time, the possibility of using optical interconnects for conventional silicon integrated circuits (ICs). If this capability can be realized, it will have a tremendous impact on the architecture and performance of complex computing and communication systems. The primary objective of this project was to understand the light-emission mechanism of electroluminescent polymers and to use this knowledge to make efficient light-emitting-polymer diodes (LEPDs). These devices are the critical missing element for a polymer-based integrated-optical interconnect technology. The authors studied and obtained experimental results in several areas including the energetic position of fundamental excitation, the degradation of the polymer caused by oxygen, and the luminescence efficiency of polymer and oligomers. Parallel to the experimental effort, theoretical calculations were performed on the microscopic scale and on the device scale