Silicon based on-chip optical phased arrays are an enabling technology to achieving agile and compact large angle beam steering. In this work, a single layer array is presented, and approaches to multilayer 3D photonic integration for achieving a 2D array are also discussed. Finally, two dimensional optical beam steering is achieved using both thermo-optic and wavelength tuning. Various structures are considered as an alternative to the conventionally used shallow etched surface gratings to achieve narrow beam widths in the far field along with low switching power. The corrugated waveguide interspersed with 2D photonic crystal for crosstalk suppression is presented as a novel structure for coupling to free space that can provide lithographically defined index contrast in a single fabrication step, along with the smallest beam widths presented to date, at 0.25°. In addition, a polysilicon overlay with an oxide etch stop layer on top of a silicon waveguide is also presented as a grating coupler that achieves narrow far field beam widths. With this structure, two dimensional steering of 20° X 15° is demonstrated with a 16 element optical phased array, with a beam width of 1.2° X 0.4° and maximum power consumption of 20mW per channel. / text
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UTEXAS/oai:repositories.lib.utexas.edu:2152/21637 |
| Date | 18 October 2013 |
| Creators | Kwong, David Nien |
| Source Sets | University of Texas |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Format | application/pdf |
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