PostDoc Researchers - LiDAR sensors based on photonic integrated circuits

Photonics is widely regarded as the key enabling technology of the 21st century and its application and use in many scientific and industrial fields is accelerated though Photonic Integrated Circuits (PICs), which combine many optical components into a miniaturized chip format. Similar to electronic ICs, PICs are revolutionizing areas such as healthcare, communication and sensing and have the potential to be disruptive to the whole society.

A diversity of PIC-based sensors have been proposed in the last years, such as environmental sensors (e.g. gas sensing), medical sensors (e.g. optical coherence tomography) and fiber Bragg grating sensors for temperature or strain measurement. In recent years, the fast developments in the automotive industry towards self-driving cars have motivated a strong interest on light detection and ranging (LiDAR), which is the cornerstone technology for monitoring moving objects with high spatial resolution.

A fully solid-state PIC solution will not be sensitive to vibrations and will offer a series of additional advantages over mechanical-based LiDAR concepts, such as miniaturization, potential low-cost (it can be manufactured in large volumes in semiconductor fabs), high scanning speeds (it relies on photonic circuits used for Gigabit Internet data transmission), and flexibility for adaptive scanning (since the beam forming can be done on-chip).