Patent ID: 9740079
Date: 2017-08-22
CPC Classifications: G02B,G02F,H04B

Claim:
1. A beam-steering optical transceiver comprising one or more modules, wherein: each module comprises an antenna chip and a control chip bonded to the antenna chip; each antenna chip comprises an optical feeder waveguide, a plurality of row waveguides that tap off from the feeder waveguide, and a plurality of metallic nanoantenna elements arranged in a two-dimensional array of rows and columns such that each row overlies one of the row waveguides; each antenna chip further comprises a plurality of independently addressable thermo-optical 2π phase shifters, each of which is configured to produce a thermo-optical phase shift in a respective row; each antenna chip further comprises, for each respective row, a row-wise heating circuit configured to produce a respective thermo-optical phase shift at each nanoantenna element along the respective row, each said row-wise heating circuit comprising a single electric heating element for the respective row; the beam-steering optical transceiver further comprises at least one coherent photodetector optically coupled to the feeder waveguide on at least one antenna chip so that it is in receiving relationship with each of the metallic nanoantenna elements on the at least one antenna chip; and in each module that comprises a given antenna chip and a given control chip, the given control chip includes a controllable current source for each 2π phase shifter on the given antenna chip, and the given control chip further includes a controllable current source for each row-wise heating circuit on the given antenna chip.