A startup that emerged from the UC San Diego electrical and computer engineering department took first place this week in the Triton Innovation Challenge, an annual UC San Diego business competition for environmentally focused technologies.
The team is working on compact, solid state lasers for LIDAR applications. Autonomous vehicles are one of the big potential markets for this technology. The researchers are aiming at a price point that is significantly less expensive than today’s LIDAR technologies. A slide from their presentation suggests they are going for $10/device compared to LIDAR currently on the market, which comes in at more than $200/device.
The research came out of the lab of Jacobs School of Engineering electrical engineering professor Boubacar Kante. One of the key players in the startup is Ashok Kodigala, who just finished his electrical engineering grad program at the Jacobs School.
Want more details? The key technology: bound states in the continuum (BIC) lasers. They offer unique properties, including tunable emission wavelength, emission angle, and potential for high-power applications. The team is developing a tunable, chip-level, solid state BIC laser for LIDAR in Autonomous Vehicles. (Read the press release on related related 2017 Nature paper .)
The solid state LIDAR team was one of the inagural cohort of startups to be accepted into the technology accelerator launched by the UC San Diego Institute for the Global Entrepreneur in May 2017.
Second place in the same competition went to E-Way, which is a collaboration led by Wei Huang, who is a Jacobs School materials science graduate student in Joanna McKittrick’s lab, and Alejandro Conde PhD, who is currently a Rady School MBA student.
According to the UC San Diego Office of Innovation and Commercialization twitter feed @UCSDInnovation, E-Way is developing technology to safely electrify roads using solar panels
The Triton Innovation Challenge, now in its sixth year, is a business competition focused on fostering creativity and bringing to the spotlight commercially promising, environmentally focused technologies generated by the finest minds at UC San Diego. Supported through the generosity of The William and Kathryn Scripps Family Foundation Inc., the program is presented through a partnership of the Rady School of Management, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and the Jacobs School of Engineering.
The competition awards cash prizes totaling $11,000 to support new and innovative ideas that relate to the environment (comes from, inspired by, or directly impacts nature.)
According to the UC San Diego Office of Innovation and Commercialization twitter feed @UCSDInnovation, E-Way is developing technology to safely electrify roads using solar panels
The Triton Innovation Challenge, now in its sixth year, is a business competition focused on fostering creativity and bringing to the spotlight commercially promising, environmentally focused technologies generated by the finest minds at UC San Diego. Supported through the generosity of The William and Kathryn Scripps Family Foundation Inc., the program is presented through a partnership of the Rady School of Management, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and the Jacobs School of Engineering.
The competition awards cash prizes totaling $11,000 to support new and innovative ideas that relate to the environment (comes from, inspired by, or directly impacts nature.)