Group-Delay Tolerances for Coherent Combining in Tiled Apertures Driven by Photonic Integrated Circuits for Optical Communication

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Coherent combining in tiled aperture arrays requires precise group-delay matching across photonic integrated circuits and fiber interconnects to maintain signal bandwidth efficiency. A closed-form expression was derived to quantify how inter-element delay variance degrades combining performance. The analysis highlights fiber-routing tolerances as the primary constraint in scaling multi-aperture systems for free-space optical communications.