Abstract
Nano-photonic antennas are one of the key components in integrated photonic transmitter and receiver systems. Conventionally, grating couplers, designed to couple into an optical fiber, suffering from limitations such as large footprint and small field-of-view (FOV) have been used as on-chip antennas. The challenge of the antenna design is more pronounced for the receiver systems, where both the collected power by the antenna and its FOV often need to be maximized. While some novel solutions have been demonstrated recently, identifying fundamental limits and trade-offs in nano-photonic antenna design is essential for devising compact antenna structures with improved performance. In this paper, the fundamental electromagnetic limits, as well as fabrication imposed constraints on improving antenna effective aperture and FOV are studied, and approximated performance upper limits are derived and quantified. By deviating from the conventional assumptions leading to these limits, high-performance multi-mode antenna structures with performance characteristics beyond the conventional perceived limits are demonstrated. Finally, the application of a pillar multi-mode antenna in a dense array is discussed, an antenna array with more than 95% collection efficiency and 170 $^\circ$ FOV is demonstrated, and a coherent receiving system utilizing such an aperture is presented.
Highlights
A N INTEGRATED nano-photonic antenna is a planar structure fabricated on a chip [1]–[17] which is defined as a transducer that couples the guided mode into the free-space mode and vice versa1 [4]
While an integrated planar multi-mode antenna significantly increases the collection area compared to the conventional nanophotonic antennas, non-planar antenna designs can potentially lead to solutions with higher fill factor and broader FOV due to the addition of the third dimension that can be used to support additional modes
We studied the fundamental limits of antenna design for photonic transmitter and receiver systems and proposed architectures for designing high-performance antennas
Summary
A N INTEGRATED nano-photonic antenna is a planar structure fabricated on a chip [1]–[17] which is defined as a transducer that couples the guided mode into the free-space mode and vice versa1 [4]. In addition to devising novel antenna structures on a single photonic layer process, by adding a high contrast grating on top of the antenna structure [8] and bottom reflectors [6], [10] the radiation efficiency of the antenna is improved significantly. Most of these works are limited to antennas with large footprints which often have an FOV that is narrow in one of the dimensions. The application of a presented multi-mode antenna in a dense-array coherent receiver system is demonstrated
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