Laser Frequency Chirping With Silicon Photonic Circuit Comprising an IQ Modulator and a III-V/Si SOA

We report on the performance of a silicon photonic integrated circuit for laser frequency chirping, developed for FMCW LIDAR applications. An external laser source is fiber coupled to the photonic circuit and frequency chirping is achieved with a silicon IQ modulator and a monolithically integrated III-V/Si semiconductor optical amplifier to compensate for IQ modulator losses. A chirp distortion of 1.8% over 5% to 95% of the chirp ramp period was measured with a delayed self-heterodyne interferometric method. The high chirp linearity of our circuit is confirmed by FMCW ranging measurements using 2–18 m long fiber delay lines. The resulting beat frequency follows a linear dependency with the fiber delay line length (
$\text{R}^{2}=0.999$
).