A Nonuniform Sparse 2-D Large-FOV Optical Phased Array With a Low-Power PWM Drive

Integrated optical phased arrays (OPAs) capable of adaptive beamforming and beam steering enable a wide range of applications. For many of these applications, a large scale 2-D OPA with full phase control for each radiating element is essential to achieve a functional low-cost solution. However, the scalability of such OPAs has been hampered by the optical feed distribution difficulties in a planar photonics process, as well as the high power consumption associated with having a large number of phase control units. In this paper, we present a two-chip solution low-power scalable OPA with a nonuniform sparse aperture, providing radiation pattern adjustment and feed distribution feasibility in a CMOS compatible silicon photonics process. The demonstrated OPA with a 128-element aperture achieves the highest reported grating-lobe-free field-of-view (FOV)-to-beamwidth ratio of 16°/0.8°, which is equivalent to a 484-element uniform array. This translates to at least 400 resolvable spots, 30 times more than the state-of-the-art 2-D OPAs. Moreover, by utilizing compact phase shifters in a row-column power delivery grid, we reduce the number of required drivers from 144 to 37. A high-swing pulsewidth modulation (PWM) driving circuit featuring breakdown voltage multipliers and soft turn-on activation significantly reduces the power consumption of the system. The electronic driver chip and the integrated photonic chip are fabricated on a 65-nm CMOS process and a thick silicon-on-insulator (SOI) silicon photonics process, occupying 1.7 mm
²
and 2.08 mm
²
of active area, respectively.