Near-eye displays have become a technology of high interest for Augmented, Virtual and Mixed reality due to the unique immersive experience they provide to the user. The majority of these devices use macroscopic optical elements that make them bulky and heavy. Our team has proposed a disruptive near-eye display concept that uses the self-focusing effect to project an image to the user’s retina. To form an image, emissive points are generated from a dense photonic integrated circuit embedded within the lens of a pair of smart glasses. In this work, we present the design of a dense routing architecture that addresses thousands of randomly distributed emissive points from a few hundred inputs. The circuit combines unbalanced waveguide splitter trees with a non-periodical addressing onto a dense waveguide network. We present the design optimization through numerical simulations and estimate the overall device performance based on simulation results. A waveguide interlayer crossing simulation indicates losses better than 0.003 dB/crossing, which guarantees low optical losses over thousands of crossings. By unbalancing correctly the splitter trees, we can obtain homogeneous power profiles over an emissive point distribution. The experimental validation of our design will be a major step towards the elaboration of a first prototype.
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