Experimental Demonstration of Indoor Infrared Optical Wireless Communications With a Silicon Photonic Integrated Circuit

The optical wireless technology has great potential in realizing high-speed wireless communications in indoor applications, and the silicon photonics platform has been widely investigated to provide photonic integrations using advanced CMOS facilities. In this paper, the silicon integration of key beam steering function in high-speed infrared indoor optical wireless communication systems is proposed and investigated. The beam steering function is realized through edge couplers based silicon integrated optical phased array to achieve both wide operation bandwidth and high power efficiency. A 1 x 4 integrated phased array is designed and fabricated, and up to 12.5-Gb/s data transmission using the silicon integrated beam steering device through over 1.4 m free-space distance is experimentally demonstrated. Results show that error-free data transmission can be achieved with limited mobility provided to users, and the power penalty of the silicon integrated device is negligible. The outcomes successfully demonstrate the feasibility of using silicon photonic integrations in indoor optical wireless communication systems to realize compact and low-cost solutions.