2D Silicon Photonic Metalens-based Focal Plane Array (FPA) Optical Beam Steering with Wide Field-of-View (FOV) for Chip-to-Chip Optical Wireless Communication (OWC)

We put forward and demonstrate a 2D wide field-of-view (FOV) silicon photonics (SiPh) optical beam steerer via a metalens focal plane array (FPA). We illustrate the potential implementations of the SiPh metalens based FPA for chip-to-chip optical wireless communication (OWC). Experimental results show that the measured FOV is 51.4° × 6.12°, and the average full-width at half-maximum (FWHM) divergence angle is 1.4°. Bit-error-rate (BER) measurements using optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signals reveal that, while steering the beam and transmitting data at over 70 Gbit/s, the system can fulfill the hard-decision forward error correction (HD-FEC) bit-error-rate (BER) requirement of 3.8 × 10-3. We also discuss the potential of using liquid-crystal (LC) based spatial-light-modulator (SLM) as the reflective surface for the chip-to-chip OWC transmission and optical beam manipulation.