The Silmarils

LiDAR nowadays is a big bulky mechanical rotating system. This can be changed by implementing LiDAR using integrated photonics. This makes LiDAR CMOS compatible, allowing for electrical and photonic integrated circuit collaboration.

We present an optimized design of a LiDAR system by implementing an Optical Phased Array (OPA) for beam steering and a photonic neural network for classification purposes. This makes the LiDAR system CMOS compatible, dimensionally smaller than current LiDAR and without moving mechanical parts that may wear overtime. This makes the design very suitable for drones. The complete LiDAR system is divided up into three different chips. The first one is the integrated photonic LiDAR system where the Optical Phased Array is situated. This chip also contains all main optical splitters that split light beams on the chip. The second chip hosts a photonic neural network and the third chip contains the electronic part of the system that makes it possible to obtain the distance and velocity of an object by using the FMCW LiDAR principle.