Hybrid design approach of optical phased array with wide beam steering range and low side-lobe level

In this paper, an optical phased array (OPA) with wide beam steering angle and low side-lobe level is designed based on the hybrid approach of particle swarm optimization (PSO) and convex optimization (CVX). The optimization process is divided into two steps. First, the antenna spacing distribution of the OPA is designed to obtain a wide beam steering range by using a PSO algorithm. Second, based on the antenna spacing distribution obtained in the previous step, the CVX algorithm is used to obtain the excitation amplitude and phase distribution of the OPA under different beam steering angles. By using this approach, we design an OPA with 1024 antennas. The beam steering range of the OPA is ±60° and the side-lobe level is reduced to −24.65 dB.