Design and Fabrication of Silicon-based Optical Phased Array

Compared with the traditional mechanical scanning system, the silicon-based optical waveguide phased array has the advantages of fast scanning speed, low power consumption, small insertion loss, small size, light weight, and high integration. Therefore, it is used in intelligent driving, celestial navigation, genetic diagnosis, etc. Also many advanced fields such as new optical communications have huge application prospects. In this paper, theoretical simulation, layout drawing and device preparation are carried out on the device design of the silicon waveguide phased array system. The main research contents are as follows. First, by designing a reasonable cross-sectional size of the waveguide, it is verified that the SOI-based silicon optical waveguide has a lower electromagnetic wave loss in the local optical field in the TE mode. Secondly, the input grating coupler and output grating antenna structure for spatial optical waveguide transmission are designed, and the propagation direction and intensity distribution of the optical field in the grating coupler are obtained, indicating that the coupling efficiency and output efficiency are both greater than 50%. Meanwhile through the structure design and optimization of the multi-mode interferometer of multi-element phased array beam splitting, the output intensity reaches 90%. Finally, the 8-element and 16-element array layouts were drawn, and the corresponding all-solid phased array micro-nano structure was fabricated, the size of which was consistent with the design, laying the foundation for the next step of performance verification.