Beam Controller and Beam Steering Method

Abstract

The present disclosure relates to an optical phased array based beam controller. The beam controller includes an optical phased array, a free space beam combining area and a shared grating emitter. The optical phased array includes: a beam splitter and a waveguide array coupled with the beam splitter. The beam splitter is configured to equally divide the initial beam into a plurality of sub-beams. The waveguide array includes: a plurality of waveguides arranged in one-to-one correspondence with the sub-beams. The waveguides are configured to receive and transmit sub-beams. The transmission tail sections of multiple waveguides are fan-shaped and concentrated in the free space beam combining area. The free-space beam combining area is configured to combine multiple sub-beams on the image plane. The shared grating emitter is configured to: synthesize a plurality of sub-beams on the image plane to emit a synthesized beam through diffraction. The beam controller can control the synthesized beam to achieve high scanning output efficiency while achieving large-angle emission.

Description

technical field [0001] The present disclosure relates to the technical field of optical communication, and in particular, to a beam controller and a beam control method. Background technique [0002] As one of the key technologies in lidar, free space optical communication and other fields, beam steering can also be applied to holographic display, biological imaging and other fields. At present, with the development of silicon-based photonics technology, beam steering is realized by optical phased array (OPA), which can have the advantages of smaller size, faster speed and lighter weight. [0003] Illustratively, an optical phased array (OPA) includes a star coupler or beam splitter, and an array of waveguides coupled to the star coupler or beam splitter. The waveguide array is composed of N parallel waveguides arranged in a row, wherein each waveguide is integrated with a controllable phase shift device, and each waveguide is also coupled with a second-order linear grating...

AI Technical Summary

Problems solved by technology

Due to the large size of the weak grating, under the premise of ensuring that the grating sidelobe does not appear in the beam scanning, the distance between adjacent second-order linear gratings is small, which will easily lead to coupling crosstalk between the corresponding parallel arranged waveguides

Also, the longer the transmission distance of the waveguide, the greater the crosstalk generated

This will greatly affect the optical performance of the optical phased array, such as reducing its exit angle, reducing its scanning output efficiency, etc.

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