Optical phased array (OPA) technology is considered a promising solution for solid-state beam steering to supersede the traditional mechanical beam steering. As a key component of the LIDAR system for long-range detection, OPAs featuring a wide steering angle and high resolution without beam aliasing are highly desired. However, a wide steering range requires a waveguide pitch less than half of the wavelength, which is easily subjected to cross talk. Besides, high resolution requires a large aperture, and it is normally achieved by a high count number of waveguides, which complicates the control system. To solve the mentioned issues, we design two high-performance 128-channel OPAs fabricated on a multilayered SiN-on-SOI platform. Attributed to the nonuniform antenna pitch, only 128 waveguides are used to achieve a 4 mm wide aperture. Besides, by virtue of innovative dual-level silicon nitride ( Si 3 N 4 ) waveguide grating antennas, the fishbone antenna OPA achieves a 100 ° × 19.4 ° field of view (FOV) with divergence of 0.021 ° × 0.029 ° , and the chain antenna OPA realizes a 140 ° × 19.23 ° FOV with divergence of 0.021 ° × 0.1 ° . To our best knowledge, 140° is the widest lateral steering range in two-dimensional OPA, and 0.029° is the smallest longitudinal divergence. Finally, we embed the OPA into a frequency-modulated continuous-wave system to achieve 100 m distance measurement. The reflected signal from 100 m distance is well detected with 26 dBm input transmitter power, which proves that OPA serves as a promising candidate for transceiving optical signal in a LIDAR system.
Two novel waveguide gratings for optical phased array transmitters are investigated. By offsetting the grating structures along the waveguide on the upper and lower surfaces of the silicon nitride (Si3N4) waveguide, the dual-level chain and dual-level fishbone structures can achieve 95% of unidirectional radiation with a single Si3N4 layer by design. With apodized perturbation along the gratings, both structures can achieve uniform radiation without compromising the unidirectional radiation performance. In experiment, both demonstrate ∼ 80-90% unidirectionality. With further analysis, it is found that the dual-level fishbone structure is more feasible and robust to process variations in uniform radiation.
The optical power handling of an OPA scanning beam determines its targeted detection distance. So far, a limited number of investigations have been conducted on the restriction of the beam power. To the best of our knowledge, we for the first time in this paper explore the ability of the silicon photonics based OPA circuit for the high power application. A 64-channel SiN-Si based one-dimensional (1D) OPA chip has been designed to handle high beam power to achieve large scanning range. The chip was fabricated on the standard silicon photonics platform. The main lobe power of our chip can reach 720 mW and its peak side-lobe level (PSLL) is -10.33 dB. We obtain a wide scanning range of 110° in the horizontal direction at 1550 nm wavelength, with a compressed longitudinal divergence angle of each scanning beam of 0.02°.
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