Scalable low-power silicon photonic platform for all-solid-state beam steering

You-Chia Chang; Steven A. Miller; Christopher T. Phare; Min Chul Shin; Moshe Zadka; Samantha P. Roberts; Brian Stern; Xingchen Ji; Aseema Mohanty; Oscar A. Jimenez Gordillo; Michal Lipson

doi:10.1117/12.2519803

13 May 2019 Scalable low-power silicon photonic platform for all-solid-state beam steering

You-Chia Chang, Steven A. Miller, Christopher T. Phare, Min Chul Shin, Moshe Zadka, Samantha P. Roberts, Brian Stern, Xingchen Ji, Aseema Mohanty, Oscar A. Jimenez Gordillo, Michal Lipson

Author Affiliations +

Proceedings Volume 10982, Micro- and Nanotechnology Sensors, Systems, and Applications XI; 109821A (2019) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2519803
Event: SPIE Defense + Commercial Sensing, 2019, Baltimore, MD, United States

Abstract

Solid-state beam steering is the key to realize miniature, mass-producible LIDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) and freespace communication systems without using any moving parts. The huge power consumption required in solid-state beam steering, however, prevents this technology from further scaling. Here we show two different approaches to enable lowpower solid-state beam steering. In the first approach, we use spatial-mode multiplexing to reduce the power consumption of the phase shifters in a large-scale optical phased array. We show an improvement of phase shifter power consumption by nearly 9 times, without sacrificing optical bandwidth or operation speed. Using this approach, we demonstrate 2D beam steering with a silicon photonic phased array containing 512 actively controlled elements. This phased array consumes only 1.9 W of power while steering over a 70° × 6° field of view. This power consumption is at least an order of magnitude lower compared to other demonstrated large-scale active phased arrays. In the second approach, we achieve 2D beam steering with a switchable emitter array and a metalens that collimates the emitted light. The power consumption of this approach scales logarithmically with the number of emitters and therefore favors large-scale systems. This approach allows straightforward feedback control and better robustness to environmental temperature change. Our approaches demonstrate a path forward to build truly scalable beam steering devices.

Conference Presentation

Citation Download Citation

You-Chia Chang, Steven A. Miller, Christopher T. Phare, Min Chul Shin, Moshe Zadka, Samantha P. Roberts, Brian Stern, Xingchen Ji, Aseema Mohanty, Oscar A. Jimenez Gordillo, and Michal Lipson "Scalable low-power silicon photonic platform for all-solid-state beam steering", Proc. SPIE 10982, Micro- and Nanotechnology Sensors, Systems, and Applications XI, 109821A (13 May 2019); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2519803

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