Fast-speed and low-power-consumption optical phased array based on lithium niobate waveguides

Fast scanning speed and low-power consumption are becoming progressively more and more important in realizing high-performance chiplet optical phased arrays (OPAs). Here, we successfully demonstrated integrated OPAs with multiple waveguides channels based on thin-film lithium niobate-on-insulator (LNOI) platform. Specifically, two lithium niobate (LN) OPA chips have been implemented with 32 and 48 channels LN waveguides, respectively, enabled by electro-optic modulations, which showcases the low power consumption (1.11 nJ/π) and fast operation speed (14.4 ns), showing obvious advantage of the LNOI platform over others. As results, we experimentally achieved a beam steering with a 62.2° × 8.8° field of view (FOV) and a beam divergence of 2.4° × 1.2° for 32 channels, and a FOV of 40° × 8.8° and a beam divergence of 0.33° × 1.8° for 48 channels. This work also demonstrates the feasibility of LNOI platform in scalable OPA chips.