Optical Leaky Waveguide Antenna Using Shallow Etched Circular Waffled Waveguide

This paper presents a kind of optical leaky waveguide antenna (OLWA), circular waffle waveguide (CWWG), and demonstrates the gain enhancement by reducing perturbations. This antenna is fabricated by silicon photonics which is low-cost and mass-production. The CWWG has circular hole array on the waveguide surface instead of conventional linear grating. These holes reduce perturbations to extend effective antenna aperture, resulting in high antenna gain. To reduce more perturbations, we fabricate shallow hole array on waveguide surface. We confirm the antenna gain enhancement of the CWWG in both the simulation and the experiment.