Progress on self-mixing sensors for in-situ displacement measurement

This document presents a survey on reported devices exploiting the emerging technology of self-mixing interferometry for non-contact displacement reconstruction. Nowadays, there is a broad diversity of signal processing methods over self-mixing devices, making difficult to decide which one would satisfy a given application domain. It has been observed that a change in the requirements specification implies a complete redesign of the system. Therefore, this analysis aims to identify the characteristics and features of actual systems in order to narrow the path to take towards the development of an embedded sensor. For this study, we consider the systems promising a robust usage for operation in a non-conditioned environment. We present the tradeoffs between complex signal processing, the usage of external components and precision of the device. From this report we observe that maintainability and scalability still penalize overall system deployment and we suggest that should be considered for time-to-market solutions.