Large-scale optical phased array using a low-power multi-pass silicon photonic platform

By Steven A. Miller, You-Chia Chang, C. Phare, Min Chul Shin, M. Zadka, S. Roberts, B. Stern, Xingchen Ji, A. Mohanty, Oscar A. Jimenez Gordillo and 2 more. 2020

214 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Optical phased arrays are a promising beam-steering technology for ultra-small solid-state lidar and free-space communication systems. Long-range, high-performance arrays require a large beam emission area densely packed with thousands of actively phase-controlled, power-hungry light emitting elements. To date, such large-scale phased arrays have been impossible to realize since current demonstrated technologies would operate at untenable electrical power levels. Here we show a multi-pass photonic platform integrated into a large-scale phased array that lowers phase shifter power consumption by nearly 9 times. The multi-pass structure decreases the power consumption of a thermo-optic phase shifter to a ${{\rm P}_\pi }$Pπ of ${1.7}\;{\rm mW/}\pi $1.7mW/π without sacrificing speed or optical bandwidth. Using this platform, we demonstrate a silicon photonic phased array containing 512 actively controlled elements, consuming only 1.9 W of power while performing 2D beam steering over a ${70}^\circ \times {6}^\circ $70∘×6∘ field of view. Our results demonstrate a path forward to building scalable phased arrays containing thousands of active elements.

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ce3e40141cf8b90248d2f5ba088880119cc9db7a