Silicon-Based Polarization-Insensitive Optical Antenna Design and Experimental Characterization of Optical Phased Arrays

Optical Phased Array (OPA) has emerged as one of the most popular technologies in recent years. The integration of optoelectronics components on-chip allows the OPA to steer the beam to achieve ranging, detection, and free-space communication without having any moving parts. The thesis includes two parts. Firstly, a polarization-independent optical surface grating antenna designed for OPA is presented. The designed antenna emits both quasi-transverse electric (TE) and quasi-transverse magnetic (TM) modes towards the same angle with similar beamwidth. With the increasing demanding for mode-division multiplexing systems, the incorporation of such antenna in an OPA system allows an additional channel of data transmission while preserving the steerability of the array. In the second part of the thesis, the optical testing setup for a fabricated on-chip OPA system is designed and presented. With the testing setup designed and assembled, a comparison between the observed and simulated far-field images is also presented.