According to the news from the School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science at Peking University on March 14th, Professor Wang Xingjun’s research team, along with Associate Researcher Chang Lin, has developed a new silicon-based multi-channel chaotic light source after two years of research. They have proposed a parallel laser radar architecture based on a chaotic light comb and have overcome two world-class challenges: laser interference and high-precision parallel detection. This guarantees high-performance and high-security while greatly reducing the future laser radar system’s volume, complexity, power consumption, and cost.
It is reported that with the increasing popularity of advanced autonomous driving, the laser radar, which ensures comfortable and safe driving, is receiving more and more attention as its core component. High-performance, small size, low cost, low power consumption, and high safety laser radar is the direction that future manufacturers are competing for.
The research team generated natural multi-channel random modulation signals by integrating micro-cavity optical combs with modulation instability. The signal chaos bandwidth can exceed 7GHz, and the modulation instability state of the optical comb exhibits good robustness within an 18GHz detuning range, and can cope with the frequency jitter of external pump sources. At the same time, the high nonlinear coefficient of the material makes the threshold power of the generated modulation instability optical comb lower than other material platforms by 1-2 orders of magnitude, and can be integrated with on-chip DFB lasers.
Architecture of Integrated Parallel Chaotic LiDAR System
Based on this, the research team built a parallel LiDAR demonstration system and conducted high-precision 3D imaging of physical targets, verifying single-pixel imaging at a scale of 10 channels and demonstrating good orthogonal isolation between channels. In addition, the research team tested the noise suppression power-to-noise ratio of the received signal under different signal interference and aliasing, and found that the power dynamic range of a single signal was close to 60 dB under the 3 dB threshold criterion and 12.5 μm integration time, the noise suppression power-to-noise ratio for frequency modulated continuous wave signals was close to 30 dB, and the noise suppression power-to-noise ratio for self-random modulation signals could reach 22 dB, demonstrating good active anti-interference capability. These results are expected to promote the revolution of the next generation of high-performance anti-interference LiDAR.
The research results of the team were published in the journal Nature Photonics on March 13, 2023, under the title “Breaking the temporal and frequency congestion of LiDAR by parallel chaos“.
Source：IThome
good news
thanks