In many applications such as autonomous vehicle and ADAS (advanced driver assistance system), both LIDAR and camera sensors play important and complementary roles in sensing surroundings. The scanless LIDAR sensor on chip architecture disclosed in this application is suitable to build a LIDAR and a camera sensor on a single chip and share one set of optics, enabling a combined FMCW Doppler LIDAR and camera sensor inherently to work together and jointly sense directions in field of view simultaneously in parallel, without mechanical, electronic or photonic scanning, no extra efforts are needed to align them either, and multi-domains of sensed information are in inherent fusion. The combined optical sensor provides object sensing information in multiple domains: angles of view, distance, relative velocity, colors (in red-green-blue vector) and light strength, also provides better than sequential transmission of massive sensed data, to transfer the massive amount of data according to priority.
MULTI-DOMAIN OPTICAL SENSOR