Our daily lives and especially the environment we interact with is driven by digital technologies which benefit from interconnectivity. The cloud and all technologies that interact with it require an ever more necessity for higher bandwidths and as such these technologies are venturing into portions of the electromagnetic spectrum that can deliver on this high demand. This necessity requires high bit-rate, point to multi point free-space communication capability, even under the most extreme weather conditions. Terahertz (THz) enabled technologies can satisfy this need offering a solution to the increasing demand; however, these regions of the electromagnetic spectrum prove difficult due to high atmospheric attenuation. This difficulty will be overcome with PLASNANO’s radical vision to develop plasmon driven amplification means based on novel 2D materials which will usher in a new era of THz sources. Using novel microtransfer printing (μTP) technologies this radical amplification method will be integrated into a BiCMOS pilot line for production and enhance sources which so far have not been commercially developed due to strong limitations in terms of 1) available power and 2) ease of implementation. Currently, the power levels of semiconductor THz emitters fall off exponentially forming a gap region in the 0.5-3 THz range: the existing sources that can surpass the required output power fail in terms of bandwidth, which is crucial for many applications not only for communications but also sensing and imaging. This technology which will be demonstrated with existing state-of-the-art THz sources developed by leading members of the PLASNANO team will transform all industries which rely on THz sources that span the sub-THz to multi-THz frequency range. PLASNANO’s vision for the growth of novel 2D materials integrated into a SiGe source using BiCMOS technology has the potential to revolutionize the industry by allowing for free-space coupling from any THz source. This ground breaking approach will allow multiple industries involved in various THz application areas to prosper. Thus, this technology has the potential to dominate the multi-billion-dollar THz application market in the near foreseeable future. Figure 1 summarizes the bottom-up approach of PLASNANO to enable the break-through result of THz plasmonic amplifier.
