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Optical phased arrays (OPAs) which beam-steer in two dimensions (2D) are currently limited to grating row spacings well above a half wavelength. This gives rise to grating lobes along one axis which limit the field of view (FOV), introduce return signal ambiguity, and reduce the optical efficiency in lidar applications. We demonstrate a Vernier transceiver scheme which uses paired transmit and receive phased arrays with different row periodicities, leading to mismatched grating lobe angular spacings and only a single aligned pair of transmit and receive lobes. This permits a return signal from a target in the desired lobe to be efficiently coupled back into the receive OPA while back-scatter from the other grating lobes is rejected, removing the ambiguity. Our proposal goes beyond previously considered Vernier schemes in other domains like RF and sound, to enable adynamic Vernierwhere all beam directions are simultaneously Vernier aligned, and allow ultra-fast scanning, or multi-beam, operation with Vernier lobe suppression. We analyze two variants of grating lobe suppressing beam-steering configurations, one of which eliminates the FOV limitation, and find the conditions for optimal lobe suppression. We present the first, to the best of our knowledge, experimental demonstration of an OPA Vernier transceiver, including grating lobe suppression of 6.4 dB and beam steering across 5.5°. The demonstration is based on a pair of 2D-wavelength-steered serpentine OPAs. These results address the pervasive issue of grating lobes in integrated photonic lidar schemes, opening the way to larger FOVs and reduced complexity 2D beam-steering designs.

Active imaging and structured illumination originated in “bulk” optical systems: free-space beams controlled with lenses, spatial light modulators, gratings, and mirrors to structure the optical diffraction and direct the beams onto the target. Recently, optical phased arrays have been developed with the goal of replacing traditional bulk active imaging systems with integrated optical systems. In this paper, we demonstrate the first array of optical phased arrays forming a composite aperture. This composite aperture is used to implement a Fourier-based structured-illumination imaging system, where moving fringe patterns are projected on a target and a single integrating detector is used to reconstruct the spatial structure of the target from the time variation of the back-scattered light. We experimentally demonstrate proof-of-concept Fourier-basis imaging in 1D using a six-element array of optical phased arrays, which interfere pairwise to sample up to 11 different spatial Fourier components, and reconstruct a 1D delta-function target. This concept addresses a key complexity constraint in scaling up integrated photonic apertures by requiring only$N$elements in a sparse array to produce an image with$N^2$resolvable spots.

Optical isolators, while commonplace in bulk and fiber optical systems, remain a key missing component in integrated photonics. Isolation using magneto-optic materials has been difficult to integrate into complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) fabrication platforms, motivating the use of other paths to effective non-reciprocity such as temporal modulation. We demonstrate a non-reciprocal element comprising a pair of microring modulators and a microring phase shifter in an active silicon photonic process, which, in combination with standard bandpass filters, yields an isolator on-chip. Isolation up to 13 dB is measured with a 3 dB bandwidth of 2 GHz and insertion loss of 18 dB. We also show transmission of a 4 Gbps optical data signal through the isolator while retaining a wide-open eye diagram. This compact design, in combination with increased modulation efficiency, could enable modulator-based isolators to become a standard ‘black-box’ component in integrated photonics CMOS foundry platform component libraries.

Integrated acousto-optic (AO) devices utilize the strong overlap of acoustic and optical fields in a waveguide to facilitate efficient photon–phonon (Brillouin) interactions. For example, acoustic waves offer a lossless modulation mechanism for light. “Brillouin active” photonic platforms are currently being developed that may see optical, acoustic, and AO waveguide circuits on the same chip, where guided light and sound come together in active interaction regions. A key missing component for such a platform is a device that can multiplex modes across these two physical domains. We propose and describe a new class of optical and acoustic components, the “acoustic–optical mode multiplexer” (AOMM), a device that takes respective optical and acoustic waveguides as input ports and couples their excited guided modes into a single, joint output waveguide. We show an example suspended silicon–silicon dioxide design that combines two optical modes and a spatially separate acoustic mode into a single, co-guided output port with low insertion loss down to 0.3 dB for both optical and acoustic modes, and reflection below$-<\#comment/>20\mathrm{d}\mathrm{B}$and$-<\#comment/>11\mathrm{d}\mathrm{B}$, respectively. The AOMM may enable new, efficient integrated AO devices, such as isolators and circulators, where the acoustic wave generation and opto-acoustic interaction are separated.

Integrated astrophotonic spectrometers are integrated variants of conventional free-space spectrometers that offer significantly reduced size, weight, and cost and immunity to alignment errors, and can be readily integrated with other astrophotonic instruments such as nulling interferometers. Current integrated dispersive astrophotonic spectrometers are one-dimensional devices such as arrayed waveguide gratings or planar echelle gratings. These devices have been limited to${10}^4$resolving powers and$<<\#comment/>1000$spectral bins due to having limited total optical delay paths and 1D detector array pixel densities. In this paper, we propose and demonstrate a high-resolution and compact astrophotonic serpentine integrated grating (SIG) spectrometer design based on a 2D dispersive serpentine optical phased array. The SIG device combines a 5.2 cm long folded delay line with grating couplers to create a large optical delay path along two dimensions in a compact integrated device footprint. Analogous to free-space crossed-dispersion high-resolution spectrometers, the SIG spectrometer maps spectral content to a 2D wavelength-beam-steered folded-raster emission pattern focused onto a 2D detector array. We demonstrate a SIG spectrometer with$\sim <\#comment/>100\mathrm{k}$resolving power and$\sim <\#comment/>6750$spectral bins, which are approximately an order of magnitude higher than previous integrated photonic designs that operate over a wide bandwidth, in a$0.4{\mathrm{m}\mathrm{m}}^2$footprint. We measure a Rayleigh resolution of$1.93\pm <\#comment/>0.07\mathrm{G}\mathrm{H}\mathrm{z}$and an operational bandwidth from 1540 nm to 1650 nm. Finally, we discuss refinements of the SIG spectrometer that improve its resolution, bandwidth, and throughput. These results show that SIG spectrometer technology provides a path towards miniaturized, high-resolution spectrometers for applications in astronomy and beyond.

We propose and investigate the performance of integrated photonic isolators based on non-reciprocal mode conversion facilitated by unidirectional, traveling acoustic waves. A triply-guided waveguide system on-chip, comprising two optical modes and an electrically-driven acoustic mode, facilitates the non-reciprocal mode conversion and is combined with spatial mode filters to create the isolator. The co-guided and co-traveling arrangement enables isolation with no additional optical loss, without magnetic-optic materials, and with low power consumption. The approach is theoretically evaluated with simulations predicting over 20 dB of isolation and 2.6 dB of insertion loss with a 370 GHz optical bandwidth and 1 cm device length. The isolator uses only 1 mW of electrical drive power, an improvement of 1–3 orders of magnitude over the state of the art. The electronic drive and lack of magneto-optic materials suggest the potential for straightforward integration with drive circuits, including in monolithic CMOS electronic-photonic platforms, enabling a fully contained ‘black box’ optical isolator with two optical ports and DC electrical power.

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$27\times <\#comment/>610$array. We also demonstrate, for the first time, far-field interference of beams from two separate OPAs on a single silicon photonic chip, as an initial step towards long-range computational imaging lidar based on novel active aperture synthesis schemes.