Optical phased array power penalty analysis

Abstract

This paper investigates the power penalty from optical phased arrays used for wide-angle beam steering of optical communication signals. The analysis studies the effect of aperture size, data rate, modulation format, and diffraction angle on digital lightwave signals. The results show increasing power penalties for larger angles, aperture sizes, and data rates. At a 10 masculine steering angle, 10-cm aperture, and for both on-off keying (OOK) and differential phase-shift keying (DPSK) the 2.5-Gb/s power penalty is approximately 1.0 dB, while at 10 Gb/s the penalty increases to 7.7 dB for OOK and 7.8 dB for DPSK.