Accurate Simulation of a Shallow-etched Grating Antenna on Silicon-on-insulator for Optical Phased Array Using Finite-difference Time-domain Methods

We present simulation methods to accurately determine the transmission efficiency and far-field patterns (FFPs) of a shallow-etched waveguide grating antenna (WGA) formed on a silicon-on-insulator wafer based on the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) approach. The directionality and the FFP of a WGA with >1-mm in length can be obtained reliably by simulating a truncated WGA structure using a three-dimensional FDTD method and a full-scale WGA using a two-dimensional FDTD with the effective index method. The developed FDTD methods are applied to the simulation of an optical phased array (OPA) composed of a uniformly spaced WGA array, and the steering-angle dependent transmission efficiency and FFPs are obtained in OPA structures having up to 128-channel WGAs.