Silicon Photonics Multi-Function Engine for Low-Cost and Miniaturized Fiber Optic Gyroscope

In this work, we present a novel silicon photonics multi-function fiber optic gyroscope (FOG) engine, which is composed of a broadband optical source, an on-chip germanium (Ge) photodetector (PD), a carrier-depletion silicon modulator, polarization maintaining splitters, polarizers, as well as high-efficiency edge couplers. The engine is co-assembled with a thermo-electric cooler (TEC) in a standard butterfly package with an overall size of 22 mm×12.6 mm×8.1 mm. The experimental results exhibit obvious gyroscope effects. The extracted scale factor and linearity is 3.8739 µV/(deg/hr) and ≤ 0.3%, respectively. Leveraged with CMOS compatible silicon photonics platform and largely reduced fiber fusion splicing points, the presented silicon photonics multi-function FOG engine provides a promising solution toward a novel FOG system with low cost, high production efficiency, high integration density, strong stability, and mass production possibility, which is thus useful for miniaturized FOG sensors research and development.