Actively Controllable Beam Steering Optical Wireless Communication (OWC) Using Integrated Optical Phased Array (OPA)

We put forward and present a demonstration of an actively controlled optical beam steering optical wireless communication (OWC) system based on an integrated actively steerable optical phased array (OPA). We theoretically and experimentally analyze the emitted optical beam full-width-half-maximum (FWHM) divergence angle and field-of-view (FOV) of the proposed integrated actively steerable OPA. Experimental results show that the beam steering can be achieved over a range of 17° with a minimum optical beam FWHM divergence angle of 1.49°. Besides, the integrated OPA chip design, beam forming optimization, packaging, as well as temperature stabilization are also discussed. Genetic Algorithm (GA) is utilized to optimize the applied voltages for the 30 phase shifters to produce low-divergence optical beams in different directions. A proof-of-concept bit-error-rate (BER) measurement using 10 Gbit/s on-off-keying (OOK) signal is also carried out, and the beam steered optical signal satisfying the pre-forward error correction BER limit (pre-FEC BER = 3.8 × 10-3) is achieved.