Integrated Optical Phased Array Based on a Binary Splitter Tree With Reduced Number of Control Voltages

We experimentally demonstrate beam steering in an optical phased array (OPA) featuring a mixture of individual and cascaded phase modulator architecture embedded in the binary splitter tree. We show equivalent beam forming in a 16 channel OPA with 16 separate applied voltages and a cascaded 16ch OPA with 6 control voltages. A 32ch OPA with 10 control voltages is also demonstrated. These results illustrate a flexible means of designing an OPA with significantly fewer electrical connections than the optical channel count, while minimizing the impact of waveguide phase errors on the output beam quality.