Indie, SILC team for next gen LiDAR systems
SiLC is to use a system on chip processor from indie Semiconductor for a new generation of LiDAR laser sensors using FMCW technology.
SiLC has developed a photonic chip that can process frequency modulated, continuous wave signals for longer range LiDAR. This can achieve range of up to 300m for automotive applications and up to 1km for industrial designs.
The design had previously used an FPGA, and using the Surya SoC from indie will reduce the size of a LiDAR sensor by a factor of ten.
“We want lidar to bring benefits to a wide range of applications,” said Chet Babla, senior VP of strategic marketing at indie Semiconductor. “SILC and Indie independently decided that coherent detection is the way forward and we believe we are both class leading in our areas. We started talking in the middle of last year and agreed at the end of 2022. It’s not an exclusive deal but there’s significant investment and we are working on system reference designs.”
“We had been sharing requirements for a couple of years with indie and in order to get the cost down you have to avoid margin stacking and reduce the number of components and that’s hard to do. Working with indie who are strong on the processing side, it brings together the skill sets,” said Ralf Muenster, vice president, business development and marketing at SiLC.
“We have developed a unique silicon process with 85 patents that can put 10x higher optical power through a chip so we can push up 1W through the unique waveguide structure with 10x lower losses. This allows 2m of linearization and calibration loops on the chip with better quantum noise and we do the detectors on chip. It’s a silicon process, its fairly low cost and run through an automotive process,” he said.
The photonic chip is built on a 200mm SOI wafer at 0.13um. “We have hundreds of lidar chips on wafer. We have the laser and TIA on the chip, so the chip can give 250mW of optical power which is enough for 300m range,” he said. “We can go to mm levels of accuracy, even micron levels, at short distances and that is unique rather than 1cm. This comes from the interferometry approach we use.”
This will be teamed with the Surya chip, which has four programmable channels, each with up to 1Gsample/s capture. This is more than adequate for the LiDAR application, says Babla.
“Surya is designed from the ground up for coherent detection with analog input to point cloud output,” he said. “It has hardware accelerated DSP but the key is the ADCs. This is built on an automotive qualified process and we have chosen the process that makes sense for cost.”
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In the future SiLC aims to add beam steering to the chip,
“This is one of several designs coming down the pipe for different laser power, depth precision and long range vs short range,” said Babla. “Surya has been sampling for a while now and will be in production next year.”
The vision sensor is in beta with full qualification by the end of the year.
www.indiesemi.com; www.silc.com
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