High-Speed Wireless Communication using Beam Steering by Optical Phased Array in Silicon

Optical wireless data transmission is an emerging complementary technology compared to the radio frequency transmission. Due to the characteristics of optical radiation, optical wireless transmission has high-speed data transmission, unlimited bandwidth, high security and immune to signal interference. Despite from most self-alignment optical wireless systems such as MEMS, optical phased array (OPA) has a large advantage on the entire system size, low power consumption and high speed operation. The manufactured OPA has 16 channels, achieving +/- 22.7 degrees beam steering angle. Radiator's output beam has a beam divergence angle of 4 degrees and 6 degrees for each horizontal and vertical direction. By using the OPA, we have demonstrated a 5Gbps data transmission in free space. By phase tuning, data transmission can shift from center positioned photodetector to another photodetector at fully steered beam position. The extinction ratio of the transmission eye-diagram was over than 7dB. These results show that OPA is a promising technology for high-speed optical wireless communication with self-alignment function.