Comparative Study of Optimization Algorithms for Designing Optimal Aperiodic Optical Phased Arrays for Minimal Side-lobe Levels

초록

We have investigated the optimal design of an aperiodic optical phased array (OPA) for use in light detection and ranging applications. Three optimization algorithms - particle-swarm optimization (PSO), a genetic algorithm (GA), and a pattern-search algorithm (PSA) - were employed to obtain the optimal arrangement of optical antennas comprising an OPA. The optimization was performed to obtain the minimal side-lobe level (SLL) of an aperiodic OPA at each steering angle, using the three optimization algorithms. It was found that PSO and GA exhibited similar results for the SLL of the optimized OPA, while the SLL obtained by PSA showed somewhat different features from those obtained by PSO and GA. For an OPA optimized at a steering angle <45 degrees, the SLL value averaged over all steering angles increased as the angle of optimization decreased. However, when the angle of optimization was larger than 45 degrees, low average SLL values of <13 dB were obtained for all three optimization algorithms. This implies that an OPA with high signal quality can be obtained when the arrangement of the optical antennas is optimized at a large steering angle.

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