Improving the performance of optical antenna for optical phased arrays through high-contrast grating structure on SOI substrate

A novel optical antenna for optical phased arrays is proposed and simulated. A high-contrast grating structure is used to achieve extremely efficient emission. The emission efficiency is as high as 93.94% at 1.55 mu m, which exceeds 50% in a range of wavelength from 1.48 mu m to 1.62 mu m. The antenna can achieve a perfect grating lobe suppression with background suppression of 28.4 dB when the phase difference between adjacent waveguides is 0. A 16-wire optical phased array can easily achieve a scan range of +/- 22.8 degrees x 20.2 degrees with a beam width of 2.4 degrees x 2.5 degrees, by employing the optical antenna proposed. (C) 2019 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement