Abstract
We demonstrate a chip-scale germanium-silicon optical phased array (OPA) fabricated on a CMOS-compatible platform capable of 2D beam steering in the mid-infrared wavelength range. The OPA included a specially designed grating emitter waveguide array with uniform emission intensity along the mm -length waveguide propagation to realize very sharp instantaneous field-of-view (IFOV) and wide beam-steering total-field-of-view (TFOV). The experimental results indicated lateral beam-steering TFOV up to 12.7° by phase-tuning the waveguide array and longitudinal TFOV up to 12° by wavelength tuning. The 3-dB beam divergence is 3.08° × 0.18°. The demonstrated OPA architecture can employ wafer-scale fabrication and integration while supporting sensing and imaging applications in the mid-infrared spectral range.
Highlights
Optical beam-steering is key to emerging applications such as free-space optical communications (FSOC), active imaging, and light-detection-and-ranging (LIDAR)
We demonstrate a chip-scale germanium-silicon optical phased array (OPA) fabricated on a CMOS-compatible platform capable of 2D beam steering in the mid-infrared wavelength range
We demonstrate MWIR optical beam-steering with the OPA photonic integrated circuits (PICs) realized on a germanium-on-silicon platform fabricated using CMOS-compatible processes
Summary
Optical beam-steering is key to emerging applications such as free-space optical communications (FSOC), active imaging, and light-detection-and-ranging (LIDAR). Realizing non-mechanical optical-beam-steering on an integrated solid-state chip-scale module with reduced size and weight opens new possibilities for robust, rapidly-steering, and low-cost LIDAR and FSOC systems [2]. Optical beam steering by solid-state optical phased arrays (OPAs) [3]–[7] is attractive for exploiting well-established semiconductor manufacturing infrastructures. An array of coherent emitters with individual phase control will define and control the near-field pattern, which will determine the far-field pattern based on Fraunhofer diffraction [8]. As the far-field output beam angle is determined by the slope of the near-field phase, the beam can be steered in the desired direction by controlling the phase of each emitter [9]. Semiconductor photonic integrated circuits (PICs) have strong potentials realizing such OPAs with high integration density exploiting reliable
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