SiN optical phased array directly coupled to a high power 905 nm tapered diode laser

The scale and performance of solid-state beam steering photonic circuits intended for solid-state integrated LIDAR applications have increased significantly over the past decade, but the incorporation of a suitably powerful and low-cost light source remains a barrier to the breadth of applications for which this technology is suitable. In this work we demonstrate beam steering from a 24-channel optical phased array based on silicon nitride waveguides, directly optically coupled to a tapered laser diode based on InGaAsP operating at a wavelength of 905 nm and capable of 2 W of output optical power. In this proof-of-concept demonstration, we find experimentally the coupling loss to be approximately -8 dB.