Photonics Webinar Series: Solid state automotive LiDAR: physics principles, design challenges, and new developments
Description
Slawomir Piatek, Ph.D., Hamamatsu Corporation and New Jersey Institute of Technology
Archived webinar
Original date: June 2, 2020
About this webinar
The automotive industry and academia are actively engaged in applied research developing systems needed to make cars fully autonomous. One such system is LiDAR: it is needed to provide high-definition 3D information of the car’s surroundings at the video rate and up to a distance of about 200 meters. A complete design of a functional LiDAR is proving to be elusive, with beam steering and photodetection presenting the greatest engineering challenge.
This is a third webinar sponsored by Hamamatsu that explores technical aspects of automotive LiDAR. Its focus is a Solid State LiDAR - a specific design that does not contain any moving parts.
Topics of presentation:
- Review of time-of-flight (ToF) and frequency modulation continuous wave (FMCW) concepts in measuring distance with light.
- Discussion of non-mechanical beam steering techniques, with a focus on flash illumination, structured-light illumination, and beam steering with an optical phase array.
- Photodetection, with a focus on 2D detectors: SPAD arrays and optical phase antennas.
- Discussion of optical design in flash ToF LiDAR.
- Discussion of front-end-electronics in flash ToF LiDAR.
- Report on the current development status of functional SPAD arrays.
- Report on the current development status of complete ASICs for ToF LiDAR.
- Discussion of future prospects and developments.
About the presenter
Slawomir S. Piatek has been measuring proper motions of nearby galaxies using images obtained with the Hubble Space Telescope as a senior university lecturer of physics at New Jersey Institute of Technology. He has developed a photonics training program for engineers at Hamamatsu Corporation in New Jersey in the role of a science consultant. Also at Hamamatsu, he is involved in popularizing a SiPM as a novel photodetector by writing and lecturing about it, and by experimenting with the device. He earned a Ph.D. in Physics at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, in 1994.