Heterogeneous silicon photonics sensing for autonomous cars

Heterogeneous silicon photonics is uniquely positioned to address the photonic sensing needs of upcoming autonomous cars and provide the necessary cost reduction for widespread deployment. This is because it allows for wafer-scale active/passive integration_ including optical sources. We present our recent research and the development of interferometric optical gyroscopes and LiDAR sensors. More specifically. we show a fully integrated gyroscope front-end occupying an area of only 4.5 mm(2). We also show the first dense pitch optical phased array using heterogeneous phase shifters. The 4 mu m pitch heterogeneous phase shifters provide very low V-2 pi of only 0.35-1.4 V across 200 mn, low residual amplitude modulation of only 0.1-0.15 dB for 2 pi phase shift, extremely low static power consumption (<3 nW), and high speed (> 1 GHz). All of these factors make them ideal for next-generation LiDAR systems that employ optical phased arrays. (C) 2019 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement