A Design Approach of Optical Phased Array with Low Side Lobe Level and Wide Angle Steering Range

Abstract

In this paper, a new design approach of optical phased array (OPA) with low side lobe level (SLL) and wide angle steering range is proposed. This approach consists of two steps. Firstly, a nonuniform antenna array is designed by optimizing the antenna spacing distribution with particle swarm optimization (PSO). Secondly, on the basis of the optimized antenna spacing distribution, PSO is further used to optimize the phase distribution of the optical antennas when the beam steers for realizing lower SLL. Based on the approach we mentioned, we design a nonuniform OPA which has 1024 optical antennas to achieve the steering range of ±60°. When the beam steering angle is 0°, 20°, 30°, 45° and 60°, the SLL obtained by optimizing phase distribution is −21.35, −18.79, −17.91, −18.46 and −18.51 dB, respectively. This kind of OPA with low SLL and wide angle steering range has broad application prospects in laser communication and lidar system.

Simplified Beam Steering and Fast Error Compensation of Optical Phased Arrays by Using a Novel Weighted-Grouping Algorithm

“…The w-GPC scheme can not only achieve very good PSLL with significantly reduced hardware complexity in OPAs but also attain comparable PSLL with some existing approaches due to its phase synthesis nature, as demonstrated in Table I [14,16,21]. By comparing the work done by X.…”

“…This leads to beam broadening, loss in the peak value, and large sidelobes [18]. To address this, compensating for phase errors after fabrication often involves complex monitor and control procedures to tune the phase shifter of each antenna element [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11], actuated either thermally or electrically [18][19][20][21][22].…”

128-channel optical phased array with large field of view and low main-lobe attenuation

“…However, they were only able to obtain a SSR higher than 11 dB at 80°with the addition of the antenna diffraction factor. There are many studies of sparse arrays [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18]. Some have considered only the array factor and obtained large fields of view and high side-mode rejection ratios [11,[13][14][15]17].…”

“…There are many studies of sparse arrays [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18]. Some have considered only the array factor and obtained large fields of view and high side-mode rejection ratios [11,[13][14][15]17]. Some have fabricated chips and demonstrated a large field of view, but only the intensities normalised separately for different scanning angles are shown, not the intensity normalised to the maximum principal flap intensity [16,18].…”

Side lobe suppression analysis of spiral array optical antenna

“…5 To solve this problem different non-uniform, numerically generated emitter distributions are proposed and widely studied. [6][7][8] One of the solutions is to use a spiral array. 7,9 Being found in nature as the array optimizing the packaging of seeds in sunflowers 10 this design allowed for immediate considerable reduction of the sidelobe level.…”