Ming C. Wu (Advisor)

We developed a new architecture suitable for building a large-scale optical switch with fast response time. We have demonstrated switches with a scale of 240x240 and speed of sub microsecond using our new architecture. The switch architecture consists of an optical crossbar network with MEMS-actuated couplers and is implemented on a silicon photonics platform. To our knowledge this is the largest monolithic switch, and the largest silicon photonic integrated circuit, reported to date. The passive matrix architecture of our switch is fundamentally more scalable than that of multistage...

Within the past few decades, the goal of fully-autonomous vehicles has moved from a thought experiment to a potential reality thanks to advances in machine intelligence. One of the key challenges to still be overcome is the building of robotic perception systems which can achieve performance on-par with or surpassing that of humans. Currently, most autonomous driving researchers rely on several different modalities for collecting visual information, namely lidar, radar, and cameras. Although relying on lidar for perception has the drawback of high cost, maturing lidar technology has opened...