ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 12 -- United States Patent no. 12,248,097, issued on March 11, was assigned to Waymo LLC (Mountain View, Calif.).
"Multiplexed multichannel photodetector" was invented by Pierre-Yves Droz (Mountain View, Calif.) and Samuel William Lenius (Sunnyvale, Calif.).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A light detection and ranging (LIDAR) system can emit light toward an environment and detect responsively reflected light to determine a distance to one or more points in the environment. The reflected light can be detected by a plurality of plurality of photodiodes that are reverse-biased using a high voltage. Signals from the plurality of reverse-biased photodiodes can be amplified by ...