Inside Aurora’s Photonic Engine: Engineering Lidar for Automotive Scale

To move our FMCW lidar from discrete optics to an automotive-grade photonic engine built for scale, Aurora has assembled a team with deep expertise in integrated photonics, compound semiconductor design, and precision optical manufacturing. This blog was written by three members of that team: James Ferrara, Phillip Sandborn, and Parth Panchal. Imagine building a sensor that manipulates light at the nanometer scale (70,000 times narrower than a human hair) while detecting objects a kilometer…