Silicon photonics for LIDAR (Conference Presentation)

LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) is emerging as a necessity for fully automated self-driving automotive applications. In order to sample the far field with sufficient resolution for this application the system must incorporate many optical elements, leading to challenges for manufacturability and size. Due to the density of optical components required, LIDAR is well suited for photonic integration in order to achieve miniaturization and scalable manufacturability. This talk will give an overview of LIDAR, the components required for a chip-scale solution, and silicon photonics progress with respect to this goal.