From self-driving cars navigating busy streets to drones surveying disaster zones, lidar has become one of the most important technologies for helping machines perceive the world in three dimensions. By sending out rapid pulses of infrared light and measuring their reflections, lidar systems can build highly detailed maps of their surroundings in real time.

But today’s most powerful lidar sensors often come with major drawbacks: they are bulky, expensive, and rely on moving mechanical components that can wear out over time.

Researchers at MIT have now demonstrated a potential solution. They developed a new silicon-photonics chip that could enable compact, durable lidar systems with no moving parts. Silicon photonics uses semiconductor technology to manipulate light rather than electricity, opening the door to lidar sensors that are smaller, cheaper, and easier to manufacture at scale.

One of the biggest obstacles facing silicon-photonics lidar has been its limited field of view. Existing chip-based systems struggle to scan wide angles, while methods for expanding their coverage typically introduce noise and reduce measurement accuracy.

To overcome this challenge, the MIT team designed an array of integrated antennas that dramatically reduces unwanted interference, known as crosstalk, between neighboring antennas. Their approach allows a lidar chip to scan a much wider area while maintaining the low-noise, high-precision performance needed for demanding applications such as autonomous vehicles, aerial mapping, and construction-site monitoring.

Solid-State Lidar Could Transform Autonomous Navigation
The breakthrough could support the development of advanced lidar sensors for applications such as autonomous driving, aerial surveying, and construction site monitoring.

“The functionality we demonstrated in this work solves a fundamental problem for integrated optical-phased-array technology, enabling future lidar sensors that can achieve significantly higher performance than we could demonstrate previously,” says Jelena Notaros.