Recently, the 45th Optical Fiber Communication Conference and Exhibition (OFC) was held in San Diego, California, USA. Weihan Xu, a PhD student, won the Grand Prize of the Corning Outstanding Student Paper Competition. He studies at the State Key Laboratory of Advanced Optical Communication Systems and Networks in Department of Electronic Engineering, School of Electronics, Information and Electrical Engineering (SEIEE), Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU). Xu’s supervisors are Professor Zhou Linjie and Associate Professor Lu Liangjun.

As the premier global event for optical communications and networking, OFC is the most professional international conference with the highest level, the largest scale, and the oldest history. The 2022 event combined online and on-site conferences with 15 special sessions, more than 100 agendas and more than 500 oral reports.

This year, the conference received more than 600 papers. After peer review, oral presentation and oral defense, Xu Weihan’s paper “Fully Integrated Solid-State Lidar Transmitter on a Multi-Layer Silicon-Nitride-on-Silicon Photonic Platform” finally stood out and won the only Grand Prize in the world. The award aims to identify emerging talents in the field of optical fiber communication and optoelectronics, and to evaluate students’ research and presentation abilities.

This is also the second time that a student from Chinese mainland universities has won this award. The first winner was Fu Mengfan, also a student of SEIEE from SJTU who won the Grand Prize in 2020.

Fully Integrated Solid-State LiDAR Transmitter on a Multi-Layer Silicon-Nitride-on-Silicon Photonic Platform

In this paper, a chip-level solid-state LiDAR transmitter is designed and implemented based on the multi-layer silicon-nitride-on-silicon photonic platform. The transmitter integrates an on-chip light source and optical phased array beam-steerer, making full use of the properties of the silicon-based platform and the silicon nitride platform to complement each other to achieve large-range high-power external cavity laser generation and ultra-fine, wide-range, blade-free 2D beam rotation. Among them, the introduction of silicon nitride material can effectively remove the power bottleneck in the resonant structure and bus waveguide, optimize the power budget of the LiDAR transmitter, reduce the thermal crosstalk between phased array subchannels, and achieve the high-performance grating antenna with streamlined design. The results of this research have verified the great potential of multi-layer silicon-nitride-on-silicon photonic platform in the application of LiDAR, and accumulated important technical and engineering experience for the design of chip-level high-performance LiDAR prototypes.