Dense III-V/Si Phase-Shifter Based Optical Phased Array

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel heterogeneous III-V/Si optical phased array with record low voltage, power, and residual amplitude modulation, enabling efficient, high-performance on-chip beam steering with large range and high beam quality.

Contribution

It introduces the first III-V/Si phase-shifter based OPA with record low Vpi, power consumption, and RAM, advancing integrated optical beam steering technology.

Findings

Vpi of 0.45 V and RAM of 0.15 dB at 1550 nm

Bandwidth >1 GHz across 200 nm wavelength range

2D beam steering with 28x51 degree field of view

Abstract

High-performance integrated optical phased arrays (OPAs) are crucial for building up energy-efficient solid-state beam steering systems on a chip. This work demonstrates a first heterogeneous III-V/Si phase-shifter based OPA that utilizes III-V multiple quantum well (MQW) structures to provide superior performance. Demonstrated phase shifters have Vpi of only 0.45 V and residual amplitude modulation (RAM) of only 0.15 dB at 1550 nm for 2pi phase shift with low power consumption of less than 3 nW, which are, to the best our knowledge, the state-of-the-art performance with a record low operating voltage, low power consumption, and low RAM in on-chip OPAs. Their bandwidth is >1 GHz across 200 nm wavelength range. Wavelength tuning is used to demonstrate two-dimensional beam steering with a field of view of 28x51 degree in the 32-channel OPA with an emitter-array pitch of 2 um. Side-mode suppression ratio of 16 dB is also achieved. The high-performance heterogeneous OPA paves the way for scalable and efficient on-chip beam steerers with large steering range and high beam quality.