Bill Ring
VP of Light Source Development
Voyant Photonics
Dr William S. Ring is VP of Light Source Development at Voyant Photonics Inc., where he is responsible for laser and amplifier development and integration into the Silicon Photonics LiDAR product. Voyant Photonics is developing solid state Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) LiDAR based on a Silicon Photonics Platform.
Prior to Voyant, Bill held the position of Senior Vice President at Poet Technologies where he developed the low loss dielectric waveguide technology. This technology was a continuation of the work started at BB Photonics Inc., which Bill had founded with Bob Musk in 2014 and was later sold to Poet in 2016. Prior to starting BB Photonics, Bill was involved in the due diligence and purchase of Solar Systems Pty Ltd, an Australia concentrated Photovoltaic manufacturer, where he held the roles of Chief Operating Officer and then Chief Technology Officer from 2010 to 2014. Prior to this he had founded a consulting company In 2005 that worked with several fortune 500 companies and start ups in the areas of defense, optoelectronic components and datacenter devices.
Before 2005, Bill held Director positions within the active products group at Tyco Electronics in New Jersey. Before joining Tyco, he was a Principle Engineer at Hewlett Packard, UK and responsible for the design and development of 1310nm FP, DFB and 1480nm pump lasers for HP's Ipswich fiber optics group. Bill Holds a PhD from the University of Surrey in III-V light emitting devices
Presentations
The Needs of Automotive and LiDAR for PICs
The integration of photonic elements onto a single chip is essential to drive scale and functionality to enable automotive and consumer LiDAR. To drive this adoption, Voyant Photonics is developing silicon photonics chipsets which enable a frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) LiDAR approach. These silicon photonics engines have demonstrated performance characteristics that show distinct advantages over other LiDAR approaches.
One of the key advantages for Voyant Photonics is that the silicon photonics engines can be developed in a commercial foundry, which enables scalability and fabrication on a line with fully qualified processes. Utilizing a US based commercial foundry, the company has demonstrated solid state scanning that can eventually be incorporated into a single chipset. This enables a reduction in package complexity and eliminates several of the issues observed in mechanical based systems.
In this talk we will discuss some of the challenges and requirements for consumer and automotive LiDAR and highlight the advantages of silicon photonics and FMCW for LiDAR applications.