The press release talks about an ASIC that functionally addresses one half of the lidar challenge, which is to transmit light, to send the light out in a narrow enough pulse that allows you to get the range and the resolution that you need.
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What we're working on is how to make things better for the second generation, where you do need to worry about reliability and cost and power consumption.
IEEE Spectrum: What are you announcing today?Īnand Gopalan: Our customers are going into production with our Puck sensors for the first generation of autonomous vehicles. quarter.Īs is usual with press releases, this doesn't give us a lot of detail about what Velodyne actually has going on right now, or what exactly their plans are, so last week we spoke with Anand Gopalan, vice president of Velodyne's R&D, for some extra info. Each integrated circuit is less than 4mm square, which just covers George Washington’s nose on the U.S. The design consolidates components and results in significant advances in sensor miniaturization, reliability, and cost reduction. Velodyne LiDAR’s new approach to the development of solid-state LiDAR sensors reflects the application of a monolithic gallium nitride (GaN) integrated circuit, developed in partnership with Efficient Power Conversion (EPC). The technology can also be integrated in Velodyne LiDAR’s existing Puck form factors. LiDAR sensors that leverage this new design will be less expensive, easier to integrate due to their smaller size, and more reliable as a result of fewer moving parts.
when sold in high-volume manufacturing scale." Here's the rest of the meat from the press release: Today, Velodyne is announcing a "a groundbreaking design for a solid-state lidar sensor that can deliver a subsystem cost of under $50 U.S. As awesome as these sensors are, they cost thousands (up into the high tens of thousands) of dollars, which puts them out of reach for any consumer automobiles. Look at any autonomous car, and you'll immediately recognize Velodyne's puck sensors, soda can sensors, and the beastly HDL-64. They've been doing it pretty much since there were lidar system for self-driving cars, and due to the quality and performance of the sensors that they make, they have a virtual monopoly on the market right now. Velodyne makes automotive lidar systems for self-driving cars. It's a technical challenge, but it's also a necessary inevitability for lidar in general, which is why it's exciting to hear that Velodyne is working on solid state lidar as well. Over the last year or two, however, we've seen some prototypes of solid state lidars-lidar sensors that take all of that bulky and costly hardware and squish it down onto one or two chips that can be mass produced for cheap. The reason that lidar is expensive is because it generally involves a bunch of high quality optical components (lasers, sensors, that sort of thing) all hooked up together inside of a housing that spins. Really, the only reason why there's been so much focus on getting autonomy to work with just cameras and radar is that cameras and radar are cheap, and lidar is ridiculously expensive. Most companies developing self-driving vehicles seem to agree that the massive amount of long range, high accuracy data that you get from lidar is necessary, especially for complicated and variable urban environments. Lidar is a fantastic sensor for autonomous cars.
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