Optical phased array (OPA) has been widely employed across various applications, including light detection and ranging. Nevertheless, OPA faces significant limitations, such as excessive power consumption, complex control systems, and challenging packaging formats, which hinder its further development. Focal plane arrays (FPAs) have garnered increasing attention due to their absence of these drawbacks. However, FPAs currently face a dilemma as their ranging performance fails to meet application requirements. To address this issue, this paper presents a novel structure featuring small-scale receiving array and high directional antenna design. Utilizing this chip, we showcase a scanning range of 5.98° and a coherent detection capability of 6 meters.
Optical phased array has the advantages of low cost, small size, and high stability. It has broad application prospects in Lidar, free space optical communication, and so on. Among all of them, SiN photonic integrated circuit platforms have received much research. Compared to Si, SiN has smaller optical nonlinear effects and waveguide losses, allowing higher optical power to be emitted. However, the refractive index of SiN is smaller than Si. The pitch of SiN-based waveguides and waveguide grating antennas is larger to reduce crosstalk. This results in a smaller field of view for SiN optical phased arrays and reduces the power ratio of the main lobe to the total emission. In this work, we spaced two SiN waveguides with different propagation constants to reduce the coupling strength between adjacent waveguides. In the range of 1500 nm to 1600 nm, the crosstalk is smaller than -29 dB at the waveguide pitch of 2 μm. In this case, the field of view of the optical phased array reaches 43.89° × 8.47° (ψ × θ). For the optical phased array with 512 channels and a 1 mm long antenna, the divergence angle is 0.078° × 0.086° (Δψ × Δθ). The small spot achieves higher resolution and high point cloud density.
Optical phased array has great potential in the fields of light detection and ranging, free-space optical communication, laser imaging and biosensors due to their excellent characteristics such as all-solid-state structure, fast scanning speed, good stability, high resolution and low cost. According to the radar equation, the transmit power will directly determine the maximum ranging distance of optical phased arrays. Limited by nonlinear effects and damage threshold, it is difficult to further increase the input optical power of Si-based OPA above 30 dB. Therefore, fully utilizing the input optical power of OPA is an important issue in the research. In this paper, we demonstrate a novel three-layer silicon antenna for OPA, which consists of a upside grating layer, a waveguide layer and a downside grating layer from top to bottom. In the simulation, we found that the upward directivity of the antenna is greater than 60% in a large wavelength range of 1413 nm to 1875 nm. In addition, the maximum upward directivity of the antenna is 94.68% at 1599nm. The above result is beneficial to increase the output power of the phased array and eliminate the blind area in the field of view when the beam is scanned to the point of destructive interference. Overall, the above results show that the design proposed in this paper has great potential for application.
Light detection and ranging (LiDAR) technique is always a building block in the fields of sensing, mapping and autonomous driving navigation. Beam steering devices, which are used for light emission and reception, play a key role in LiDAR system. Lens-assisted beam-steering (LABS) is one of the most competitive candidates among various beam steering technologies. Compared with conventional integrated optical phased array (OPA), LABS unit is with lower optical loss and meanwhile lower control complexity. In this paper, we demonstrate a highly integrated LABS chip based on micro-ring optical switch array with a wide field of view (FoV, 30°×40°) and a narrow beam divergence (<0.1°). A 32×32 micro-ring optical switch array connected with a 1×1024 optical antenna array is integrated in the silicon photonic chip with an overall size of 6×14 mm2. Incident light is routed to one antenna by the micro-ring optical switch array and emitted into the free space, and the emergent light is collimated and steered by a cylindrical lens fixed above the optical antenna array subsequently. On this basis, one-dimensional steering is achieved by switching light to different antennas, while steering in the other dimension is realized via wavelength tuning. Under this circumstance, only two micro-ring switches need to be turned on at one time, leading to a significant reduction of optical loss and control complexity of the proposed chip. Notably, our work demonstrates the feasibility of large-scale integration of optical switch array within LABS chip by adopting compact micro-ring switches, paving a new path for miniatured beam scanners.
We propose a 128-channel SiN-Si dual-layer optical phased array (OPA) chip based on SOI substrate. It combines the low loss characteristics of SiN with the excellent modulation characteristics of Si. Compared with a Si single-layer OPA chip, it avoids the problem of high waveguide loss in the case of high input optical power due to the strong nonlinear absorption effect of Si. Therefore, our double-layer OPA has lower overall waveguide loss and can achieve high output power, which is conducive to long-distance detection. When it works, the beam is emitted from the end faces of its waveguides, with a radiation efficiency over 94%. Since the center spacing of the waveguides in the antenna area is close to the sub-micron scale, a large scanning range of 100.4° is achieved.
We propose and numerically investigate a double-cladded athermal waveguide structure aiming at broadband low anomalous dispersion operation. Single-crystal aluminum nitride (AlN) is the core of the waveguide, cladding with silicon oxide (SiO2) and titanium dioxide (TiO2). TiO2 with a negative thermo-optic coefficient (TOC) is used to realize material thermal compensation for AlN. By optimizing the waveguide structure parameters, it shows a near-zero broadband effective TOC, ±4×10-6 /K over a 1770-nm bandwidth from 1830 to 3600 nm. Besides, it also has low anomalous dispersion, from -20 to 20 ps/nm/km in the same wavelength range. Different with the conventional strip waveguide, the waveguide is a double cladded structure, which is easy to fabricate in practice. Furthermore, this structure will not damage the single crystal state of aluminum nitride, maintaining its original excellent optical properties.
We propose an optical beam scanner based on an on-chip 1×100 micro-ring optical switch array. By adopting a combination of optical switch array and lens system, it can achieve beam steering. It uses a simple control circuit to achieve fast beam scanning. The simulation shows that its emission efficiency exceeds 95%, which is conducive to long distance scanning and detection. All the components of this scanner can be fabricated on SOI substrate except for the optical lens, so its cost is low and the overall size of the device can be greatly reduced .In addition, since there are no moving parts in our scanner, it has advantages in performance and service life compared with mechanical optical beam steering devices. These advantages make our scanner is promising in light detection and ranging (LiDAR) field and free space optical communication field.
Si-based photonic integrated circuit is developing rapidly and has been widely used, such as optical communication, optical neural network, lidar and so on. However, Si has strong optical nonlinear effects, which limits the maximum transmitting optical power. It needs numbers of semiconductor optical amplifiers to expand the scale of the photonic integrated circuit because of the limited input optical power, which increases the complexity and cost of the Si-based photonic integrated circuits. Therefore, with much lower the waveguide loss and optical nonlinear effects than Si, SiN waveguide is able to transmit higher optical power and has received a lot of research. In this paper, a grating coupler based on SiN-Si dual-layer structure is proposed. It is composed of a layer of Si grating above the SiN waveguide layer. In the case of coupling from grating coupler to single-mode fiber, the minimum coupling loss is about -1.07 dB at 1563.5 nm, and the 1 dB bandwidth is over 100 nm. As to coupling from single-mode fiber to grating coupler, the minimum coupling loss is about -2.53 dB at 1553.4 nm, and the 1 dB bandwidth is about 65 nm. With the proposed grating coupler, it is able to effectively reduce the coupling loss between the single-mode fiber and the chip, increase the working bandwidth, and achieve higher input power. It is very helpful to reduce the complexity and cost of Si-based photonic integrated circuits, because of the reduced requirements for the number of semiconductor optical amplifiers. This will be useful in Si-SiN hybrid integration and SiN-based photonic integrated circuits.
A room temperature four-channel hybrid laser array was realized by using selective area metal bonding method, which is able to evanescently couple the light from InGaAsP multi-quantum well laser diodes into the slotted silicon waveguide. The output wavelength of this hybrid laser can be accurately tuned to 1538.6 nm, 1540.5 nm 1544.9 nm and 1550 nm through controlling the waveguide width of each channel. A typical threshold current of one channel was of 20 mA and the corresponding side-mode suppression ratio was of 20 dB. Moreover, one advantage of such slotted structures is the ease in fabrication, thus making this type of devices as a promising candidate for wavelength division multiplex in future optical communication system.
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