Adaptive Optical Thinned Antenna Array Controlled by an Integrated Photonic Processor

A generic antenna array design approach through multi-objective optimization is adopted to design a non-uniform optical thinned array (TA) satisfying a desired far-field pattern mask and minimizing the number of radiating elements. The proposed optical TA is integrated with a silicon photonic beam-forming network (BFN) made of a mesh of tuneable Mach-Zehnder interferometer to implement a self-adaptive beam transmitter/receiver for free-space optical (FSO) systems. Experimental results demonstrate the beam steering and shaping capability of the proposed architecture, which self-configures without any need for pre-calibration.