MIT engineers led by Professor Jelena Notaros built a silicon-photonics chip that solves a long-standing flaw in solid-state lidar: when antennas on these chips are packed close together for a wider field of view, their optical signals leak into each other and blur the beam.
The team's fix uses a repeating set of three antennas, each with a distinctly shaped width and corrugation pattern, giving every antenna its own propagation coefficient. That stops neighboring antennas from coupling with each other while still letting the array steer a single precise beam purely by adjusting the phase of light, with no mechanical parts. In tests, the design cut interference between antennas from roughly 100% down to about 1%, while scanning a much broader field of view than earlier chip-based designs.
Because the chip has no moving parts, it points toward lidar sensors that are smaller, cheaper and more durable than today's spinning units — useful for autonomous vehicles, aerial surveying and construction-site monitoring, where a wide, reliable field of view matters most.