Integrated Opto-Electronic Phase Locked Loops for High Performance Lidar

Lidar is drawing significant interest for a variety of applications, including self-driving cars, and medical and industrial imaging. Integrated opto-electronic phase-locked loops are critical for modulation of lasers in FMCW lidars. However, there exist fundamental trade-offs between the optical and electronic domains. For instance, for the bandwidths that are of interest for automotive applications, the optical delay required for chirp discrimination become prohibitively long and lossy. Spurs arising from the electronic domain can also significantly impair lidar performance. This talk will describe an optoelectronic PLL architecture that reduces the optical delay required for chirp discrimination by 10x, while also canceling spurs to realize high-performance chirp modulation.