11.8 Chip-scale electro-optical 3D FMCW lidar with 8μm ranging precision

Miniaturized 3D imaging systems with sub-mm precision are of high interest for applications such as high-fidelity 3D copying. 3D cameras that employ light-detection-and-ranging (lidar) units offer better spatial and depth resolution compared to radar- and ultrasonic-based cameras [1-5]. While depth is measured in common lidar architectures using the round-trip delay of a short pulse [3] (so-called “pulsed lidar”) or the phase-delay of an intensity envelope on continuous-wave (CW) light (“amplitude-modulated (AM)-CW lidar”) [4], these architectures require sub-picosecond timing resolution and commensurate with high power dissipation and large area for sub-millimeter depth precision.