5. Conclusions

This brief overview of the potential of routing structures based on two-dimensional photonic crystals presented here is far from exhaustive. Research is being conducted on both the manufacture of photonic crystals themselves, such as opals, and on more complex devices (LEDs, lasers, photonic structures for biology, solar cells, etc.). Nevertheless, the general principles on which researchers rely to design innovative and high-performance devices have been outlined. In the field of fully integrated guided optics, applications will explode once the problem of losses has been mastered without, however, inducing overly strict tolerance levels on geometry in the design. This could indeed be detrimental to the mass production of these new integrated optical circuits.

In the longer term, two other areas of research are currently of concern to the scientific community:...