Scalable tiled silicon-photonic 2D wavelength-steered optical beam LIDAR apertures (Conference Presentation)

We describe a scalable, tiled optical beam steering aperture based on integrated silicon photonic circuit beam steering tiles. A novel beam steering tile design, the serpentine optical phased array (SOPA), enables high fill factor tiled apertures, very low control complexity, an entirely passive aperture, large field of view, and extremely fast beam steering. The design provides low size, weight, and power, making it scalable to large-area (cm-to-wafer scale) apertures. We show experimental demonstrations of SOPA tiles steering an optical beam in two dimensions (2D) enabling a full 2D raster scan using wavelength sweep alone, and initial tiling and lidar demonstrations.