Integrated optical driver for interferometric optical gyroscopes

Abstract

Abstract:We present the first chip-scale "integrated optical driver" (IOD) that can interrogate with a sensing coil to realize an interferometric optical gyroscope. The chip comprises a light source, three photodiodes, two phase modulators and two 3-dB couplers within an area of 4.5 mm 2 . This allows for a significant reduction in size, weight, power consumption and cost of optical gyroscopes.

Hybrid Integrated Semiconductor Lasers with Silicon Nitride Feedback Circuits

“…Narrow linewidth and wavelength tunable diode lasers can serve high-end and upcoming applications. Prominent examples are monitoring and sensing in fabrication [7,8,9], bio-sensing [10], monitoring the integrity of civil structures [11,12], laser ranging (LIDAR) for autonomous traffic [13] or sensing of rotation with optical gyros [14,15,16].…”

Ultra-Low-Loss Silicon Waveguides for Heterogeneously Integrated Silicon/III-V Photonics

“…Given a waveguide geometry that is far from mode cut-off condition, the magnitude of the factor A in general does not depend on the waveguide width. Figure 3a shows the measured propagation loss of the two "more conventional" silicon waveguide geometries for the heterogeneous silicon platform used in previous works [10,32,33]. One is a fully 500 nm etched strip waveguide, and the other is 231 nm etched rib waveguide.…”

“…However, the large size and cost of traditional optical gyroscopes, which are based on discrete components, make them difficult to be as widely usable as MEMS gyros. In a previous work [10], we used integrated silicon photonics to miniaturize the optical driver (OD) part for interferometric fiber gyroscopes (IFOGs) to a small chip. The integrated OD chip contains every optical component needed for the gyroscope, except the fiber sensing coil, which needs to be sufficiently long to achieve high sensitivity.…”

“…The sensing part of the gyroscope is the four-meter long ULL silicon waveguide spiral with propagation loss ~4 dB/m. The sensing coil waveguides were connected with a compact integrated optical driver ( [10]) via tapers to standard and compact waveguides.…”

“…Heterogeneous Si/III-V photonics [5,7] is an attractive platform for photonic integration as it combines the best of what silicon and III-V platforms can offer and provide many kinds of high-performance passive and active optical devices on a single chip. High-capacity, large-scale PICs for communications and sensing applications have been successfully demonstrated [8][9][10][11]. The high index contrast waveguide formed between silicon and its native oxide (SiO 2 ) allows for small waveguides and tight bends enabling very compact photonic devices with small footprint, which is desirable for electronics-photonics integration [12].…”