Leap in lidar could improve safety, security of new technology

Good news! LIDAR is becoming better and cheaper!


"... In a new paper, published in Optica, [researchers] describe a new silicon chip—with no moving parts or electronics—that improves the resolution and scanning speed needed for a lidar system. ... 

Current commercial lidar systems use large, rotating mirrors to steer the laser beam and thereby create a 3-D image. For the past three years, Dostart and his colleagues have been working on a new way of steering laser beams called wavelength steering—where each wavelength, or “color,” of the laser is pointed to a unique angle. ... While great strides have been made in the size of lidar systems, they remain the most expensive part of self-driving cars by far—as much as $70,000 each. "

"Optical phased arrays (OPAs) implemented in integrated photonic circuits could enable a variety of 3D sensing, imaging, illumination, and ranging applications, and their convergence in new lidar technology. However, current integrated OPA approaches do not scale—in control complexity, power consumption, or optical efficiency—to the large aperture sizes needed to support medium- to long-range lidar. We present the serpentine OPA (SOPA), a new OPA concept that addresses these fundamental challenges and enables architectures that scale up to large apertures. ..."

Leap in lidar could improve safety, security of new technology | CU Boulder Today | University of Colorado Boulder

Here is the link to the underlying paper:
Serpentine optical phased arrays for scalable integrated photonic lidar beam steering