High-Performance Fiber Optic Gyroscope Based on a Silicon Photonic Integrated Circuit

Fiber optic gyroscopes (FOGs) are core sensors in inertial navigation systems, and their miniaturization and integration are currently hot research topics. This work presents an FOG system driven by a silicon photonics integrated circuit (PIC). The PIC, based on a 90 nm silicon-on-insulator (SOI) process, integrates core components such as polarizers, 3 dB couplers, and phase modulators within a compact footprint of 3 × 0.45 mm2. These components exhibit excellent performance over a wide spectral range and play a crucial role in high-performance FOG systems. Experimental results show that the proposed FOG system can definitively measure the small angular velocity of the Earth’s rotation (±7.5 °/h). Further Allan variance analysis reveals that the FOG system has an angular random walk (ARW) of 0.00358 °/h1/2 and a bias instability (BIS) of 0.1185 °/h. These results demonstrate the application potential of silicon photonics-based FOG systems.