MIT’s new lidar chip could give self-driving cars a wider view

Skip to main content Your source for the latest research news Follow: Facebook X/Twitter Subscribe: RSS Feeds Newsletter New! Sign up for our free email newsletter. Science News from research organizations MIT’s new lidar chip could give self-driving cars a wider view New breakthrough could help create smaller and more durable sensors for vehicles, drones, and industrial sites. Date: July 22, 2026 Source: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Summary: MIT engineers have found a way to give chip-based lidar a wider, clearer view without relying on moving parts. Their design uses differently shaped antennas that can sit close together without scrambling one another’s signals. In tests, the system sharply reduced interference while steering a single precise beam across a broad field of view. Share: Facebook Twitter Pinterest LinkedIN Email FULL STORY This illustration shows an array of integrated antennas developed by MIT researchers (right) that minimizes the unwanted crosstalk that can occur in a standard antenna array (left). This innovation could enable a lidar chip to scan a wider field of view while maintaining low-noise operation. Credit: Amy Pan and Sampson Wilcox Lidar technology uses pulses of infrared light to calculate distances and create detailed 3D maps of the surrounding environment. This allows autonomous vehicles to detect objects in their path and respond quickly. However, conventional lidar sensors are often large and costly, and many rely on moving components that can wear out over time. These limitations make the systems difficult to use in a wider range of settings. MIT researchers have now developed an approach that could lead to smaller, more durable lidar sensors that operate without any moving parts. Their advance centers on a new silicon-photonics chip, a type of semiconductor device that controls light instead of electrical signals. Existing lidar systems built with silicon-photonics chips usually have a narrow field of view. As a result, they struggle to scan areas located toward the edges of a scene. Previous attempts to expand this viewing range have often introduced extra noise and reduced measurement accuracy. The MIT team addressed those problems by creating an array of integrated antennas that greatly limits unwanted crosstalk, which occurs when neighboring antennas interfere with one another. The design allows the chip to scan across a broader field of view while producing less noise than other silicon-photonics-based methods. A Smaller Lidar System With a Wider View The advance could support the development of more capable lidar sensors for challenging uses, including autonomous vehicle navigation, aerial mapping, and the monitoring of construction sites. "The functionality we demonstrated in this work solves a fundamental problem for integrated optical-phased-array technology, enabling future lidar sensors that can achieve significantly higher performance than we could demonstrate previously," says Jelena Notaros, the Robert J. Shillman Career Development Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at MIT, a member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics, and senior author of a paper on this innovation. The study also includes lead author and EECS graduate student Henry Crawford-Eng, along with EECS graduate students Andres Garcia Coleto, Benjamin M. Mazur, Daniel M. DeSantis, and Tal Sneh. The findings were published recently in Nature Communications. How Lidar Maps Its Surroundings Many traditi