19.1 Optical Phased-Array FMCW LiDAR with On-Chip Calibration
SungWon Chung, Makoto Nakai, Samer Idres, Yongwei Ni, Hossein Hashemi
Abstract
Light detection and ranging (lidar) sensors provide high resolution and high accuracy for diverse applications such as autonomous vehicles and three-dimensional imagers. Over the past few years, there has been significant development towards compact, low-power, and low-cost realization of lidars. Recently, silicon-based large-scale optical phased arrays operating at around 1550nm [1 -4] along with their application in lidar [5] [6] have been demonstrated. A major challenge associated with large-scale optical phased arrays is the inevitable mismatches across the array that necessitate array calibration. At present, all large-scale arrays are calibrated by using an external optical detector for measuring focused far-field beam spot intensity [3] or infrared image sensors for measuring the far-field radiation patterns in the lab [1] [2] [6]. This solution, which requires an external detector at a far-field distance, naturally does not lend itself to large-scale field deployment of optical phased arrays for commercial applications with a compact form factor.