Optical phased arrays (OPAs) implemented in integrated photonic circuits could enable a variety of 3D sensing, imaging, illumination, and ranging applications, and their convergence in new lidar technology. However, current integrated OPA approaches do not scale—in control complexity, power consumption, or optical efficiency—to the large aperture sizes needed to support medium- to long-range lidar. We present the serpentine OPA (SOPA), a new OPA concept that addresses these fundamental challenges and enables architectures that scale up to large apertures. The SOPA is based on a serially interconnected array of low-loss grating waveguides and supports fully passive, 2D wavelength-controlled beam steering. A fundamentally space-efficient design that folds the feed network into the aperture also enables scalable tiling of SOPAs into large apertures with a high fill-factor. We experimentally demonstrate, to the best of our knowledge, the first SOPA using a 1450–1650 nm wavelength sweep to produce 16,500 addressable spots in a
The design, fabrication, and characterization of a 16-element optical phased array (OPA) using a high index (
- Award ID(s):
- 2023730
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10394569
- Publisher / Repository:
- Optical Society of America
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Optics Letters
- Volume:
- 48
- Issue:
- 3
- ISSN:
- 0146-9592; OPLEDP
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- Article No. 807
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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