A Large-Range Steering Optical Phased Array Chip and High-Speed Controlling System
Min Tao, Tao Peng, Changchun Ding, Jian Guan, Yingzhi Li, Lanxuan Zhang, Baisong Chen, Liangli Gao, Xueyan Li, Junfeng Song, Fengli Gao
Abstract
The optical phased array (OPA) chip is becoming the core component of all-solid-state lidars. In order to realize the wide-angle range beam scanning and rapid control of OPA-based solid-state lidars, we design and fabricate a 64-channel silicon-based OPA chip based on thermo-optical modulation. In accordance with the optical phase control characteristics of the multichannel thermo-optic OPA chip, we propose a parallel random access memory (RAM) array technique to realize high-speed phase control for the OPA chip and build the hardware system with a field-programmable logic gate array (FPGA). This system is used to test the main performance indicators of the OPA chip and realizes the high-speed scanning control of the wide-angle range of the OPA output beam. The test results show that the OPA chip we designed can achieve fast beam scanning within a large angle range between −32.5° and +32.5°, and the chip has high working reliability. Combined with the control system we build, it can meet the high-speed radar scanning requirements of all-solid-state lidars. This work lays a good foundation for the subsequential development of our thermo-optical and electrooptic OPA all-solid-state lidar prototypes.