Optical beam steering is widely used in in three-dimensional (3D) imaging, like Lidar for remote sensing and mapping, secure free-space optical communications, and holography. At present, the commercial optical beam steering system, which is made by mechanical scanning, is hard to integrate to small-size platform and meet the speed requirement of some application scenarios. To integrate such a system in small-size platform, e.g. self-driving car and drones, the key point is to miniaturize the whole system, which is need to reduce the size, weight, and the power consumption.

Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), and photonic integrated circuit (PIC)are two different solutions to achieve miniaturization. However, due to MEMS based on mechanical scanning, it is hard to achieve fast scanning. On the contrary, PIC technology not only holds the promise of achieving low-cost, compact, robust and energy-efficient complex optical systems, but electro-optical or electro-thermal modulator can easily achieve high speed (GHz). ITO is a promising material to achieve efficiency and high speed modulator. ITO has good electrical conductivity and optical transparency. With charge carriers increasing in ITO, the transparency of ITO will decrease, which means strong optical modulation can be achieved by using ITO.

This thesis paper fathoms the possibilities of building the optical phased array system based on ITO. The ITO based MZM phased modulator and optical phased have been proposed and analyzed in this paper. Also the fabrication process of those device is presented. Moreover, the optical phased array built by photonics crystal array with ITO is proposed in this paper.