A wide band optically controlled phase array antenna beam-steering by wavelength switching

This paper presents an experimental system of a wide band optical phased array antenna. The main advantage of the system is using tunable laser and WDM (wavelength-division-multiplexer) to achieve different time delay combinations. The beam-steering of the antenna is completed by wavelength switching of the tunable laser. Experimental results show that the optical phased array antenna can scan ±30° from 2GHz to 6GHz and the beam pointing appears not offset. The antenna has the features that can widely scan with a large bandwidth.