I created this emitter alignment station at a previous company. The premise is that we had an optical phased emitter that required proper calibration, with those calibration values subsequently flashed to the onboard control ASIC memory.
To properly collimate & ultimately calibrate the emitters, I created a reduced length radiometric calibration station. The reduced length radiometric system is a method for measuring far-field intensities of collimated beams in a significantly reduced physical length.
Intensities must be measured in the far field to get meaning results, but many times direct far field measurement isn’t practical. The reduced length radiometric system optically images the detector to far field, but leaves the detector physically close to the source being measured.
I designed and built this station, and integrated all of the hardware, relays, controllers, and motion stages into a custom Python application that I fully developed. The emitter was located and placed on the lower chuck, and a switch turned on a venturi vacuum to hold the emitter housing in place.
The calibration station allowed for 6 axis movement to properly align and attach the emitter lens.
The python software I wrote communicated with the emitter via defined eth commands sent to a ZYNQ control board that handled the direct ASIC communications.
The phase of each emitter channel was scanned, with the power recorded via a standard ThorLabs power meter (pyVISA). Once the phase offsets of all emitter channels was known, a calibration routine would create the proper scan table for all angles, and then write those directly to the onboard control ASIC.
Date
2017-2019
Designer
Isai Olvera
