Free-space beam steering in two dimensions using a silicon optical phased array

Author

Doylend, J.K. ; Heck, Martijn J. R. ; Bovington, J.T. ; Peters, J.D. ; Coldren, Larry A. ; Bowers, John E.

Author_Institution

Dept. of Electr. & Comput. Eng., Univ. of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

fYear

2012

fDate

4-8 March 2012

Firstpage

1

Lastpage

3

Abstract

We report an independently tuned 16-channel optical phased array fabricated in silicon for 2D free-space beam steering. The phased array was composed of silicon-on-insulator waveguide surface gratings integrated with thermo-optic phase tuners and was operated both using a control algorithm together with automated real-time far field image analysis to target and shape the beam, and using a lookup table without real-time feedback. The device exhibited 1.6° × 0.6° beam width and 10 dB background suppression in the far field across a 20° × 14° field of view. We show that by increasing the waveguide width from 1 μm to 3 μm we can suppress the side-lobe peaks by a factor of 2.

Keywords

beam steering; diffraction gratings; integrated optics; optical arrays; optical fabrication; optical interconnections; optical waveguides; silicon-on-insulator; Si; free-space beam steering; independently tuned optical phased array; silicon optical phased array; silicon-on-insulator waveguide surface gratings; thermo-optic phase tuner;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Optical Fiber Communication Conference and Exposition (OFC/NFOEC), 2012 and the National Fiber Optic Engineers Conference

Conference_Location

Los Angeles, CA

ISSN

pending

Print_ISBN

978-1-4673-0262-3

Type

conf

Filename

6476417