Design and analysis of a two-dimensional large-scale silicon-photonic optical phased array

•The theoretical model of two-dimensional (2D) Silicon-photonic optical phased array (OPA) was established. For 2-D beam-steering in an N × N OPA, only 2 N phase shifters are used to adjust the relative phases between elements and no laser wavelength tuning is performed.•We use direct design, inverse design and particle swarm optimization to design compact, low-loss, and high-performance silicon-photonic devices, including edge couplers, multimode interference (MMI) couplers, thermo-optic phase shifters (TOPSs), directional couplers (DCs), cross waveguide (CW), Y branch, and grating antenna.•For the thermo-optic phase shifter (TOPS), we introduce the semiconductor material AlN to solve the problem of slow modulation speed and large size.•We achieve the minimum antenna spacing of 2D OPA is 8.5 μm. The simulation results show that the OPA achieves 10.5° × 10.5° 2D-beam steering at a 1.55-μm wavelength using only 16 TOPSs.