High-Data-Rate and Wide-Steering-Range Optical Wireless Communication via Nonuniform-Space Optical Phased Array

The silicon photonic optical phased array (OPA) featured by high integration and agile beam steering exhibits greatly potential application in optical wireless communication (OWC). In this article, we demonstrate high-data-rate and long-range OWC using an integrated Silicon-Silicon Nitride OPA chip with 12 mm2large aperture. The OPA chip constituted by 128 waveguide grating antennas at nonuniform spacing is employed for wide-steering and small-divergence solid beam steering. In the experiment, we demonstrated 100° wide range communications in horizontal direction via antenna phase tuning. To our best knowledge, 100° is the widest cover range in the reported OPA-based OWC systems. Moreover, the OPA chip is also utilized to achieve up to 32 Gb/s low BER transmission of non-return-to-zero (NRZ) signal over 54 m free space distance. In addition, we also successfully demonstrated more than 50 Gb/s PAM4 signal transmission by measuring clear eye diagrams at the horizontal direction of 0° and 50° over 10 m. Thanks to agile beam steering of the OPA, switching time among arbitrary positions in multi-targets communication can be less than 27 μs. By virtue of tiny beam divergence 0.021° × 0.029° emitted from the OPA, data transmission switching between two targets spaced at 3.5 cm over 20 m can be achieved accurately. The experimental measurement shows the sidelobe crosstalk from the adjacent target channel is less than −25.2 dB. Our demonstrations validate the feasible implementation of the silicon-based OPA in the high-data-rate and wide-steering-range OWC system.