Silicon photonics co-integrated with silicon nitride for optical phased arrays

Abstract

In the current work we present Si and SiN combined photonic built-up for optical phased arrays (OPAs) and other large area photonic integrated circuits. We report low-loss co-integrated SiN waveguides and nearly lossless vertical transitions between Si and SiN layers, as well as efficient Si thermo-optical phase shifter module. OPA consisting of 64 optical antennas forming highly collimated beam with 0.4° × 0.47° divergence is reported. By changing input wavelength, solid-state beam steering of 0°–10° is achieved.