One-Dimensional Off-Chip Beam Steering and Shaping Using Optical Phased Arrays on Silicon-on-Insulator

Abstract

Abstract-Optical beam steering can find applications in several domains such as laser scanning, LiDAR (Light Detection And Ranging), wireless data transfer and optical switches and interconnects. As present beam steering approaches use mechanical motion such as moving mirrors or MEMS (MicroElectroMechanical Systems) or molecular movement using liquid crystals, they are usually limited in speed and/or performance. Therefore we have studied the possibilities of the integrated silicon photonics platform in beam steering applications. In this paper, we have investigated a 16 element one-dimensional optical phased array on silicon-on-insulator with a field-of-view of 23• . Using thermooptic phase tuners, we have shown beam steering over the complete field-of-view. By programming the phase tuners as a lens, we have also shown the focusing capabilities of this onedimensional optical phased array. The field-of-view can easily be increased by decreasing the width of the waveguides. This clearly shows the potential of silicon photonics in beam steering and scanning applications.

Integrated Optical Beam Steerers

“…When steering at an θ y -angle of 18 • (being the free-spectral range of the array), the far-field coincides with the original far-field at 0 • . More information can be found in [5] and other interesting work in [6]. These structures can also be used for efficient light collection of scattered light as discussed in [7].…”

Efficient Light Collection and Direction-of-Arrival Estimation Using a Photonic Integrated Circuit

“…2(b). The voltage-phase relationship of these heaters was characterized in previous work [7]. The 16 waveguides then gradually taper to a 2 µm wide shallow etched waveguide spaced 2.2 µm before entering the free propagation region of the star coupler.…”

“…The technique proposed here, also gives us the possibility to perform Direction-Of-Arrival (DOA) estimation using a straightforward sweeping algorithm. The component is a one-dimensional Optical Phased Array (OPA) fabricated on Silicon-On-Insulator (SOI) of which the far-field characteristics have been studied in detail in [7]. This component allows us to investigate the incoming wavefront and efficiently couple this into an integrated photonic wire.…”

Plane wave excitation by taper array for optical leaky waveguide antenna

“…Grating waveguides (GWGs) and optical phased arrays have attracted attention as optical antennas toward next era high-speed optical wireless communication and other advanced applications such as light detection and ranging [1,2,3,4,5]. The GWGs are a type of optical leaky waveguide antennas (OLWAs), which gradually radiate a guided mode to free space by the refractive index perturbation of the periodic linear grating.…”