Groundbreaking scanning lidar silicon chip for autonomous vehicles

Scantinel Photonics has released the first chip-scale massive-parallelized scanning lidar system (OEATM) based on a photonic integrated circuit (PIC).

The PIC provides 256 channels and allows full performance long-range (>300m) solid-state scanning.

The development and fabrication of the PIC was made in collaboration with imec.

A CMOS-compatible fabrication of the PIC at wafer-level dramatically lessens cost, size, weight, and power for a lidar system. It can be scaled for high volume applications, such as autonomous vehicles.

Utilising standard CMOS fabs gives the company the advantage of building FMCW Lidar on a chip at a very attractive and competitive cost.

"Our unique Optical Enhanced Array (OEATM) is combining the PIC with Scantinel’s own developed optics, which is certainly a groundbreaking development," said Vladimir Davydenko, one of the co-founders of Scantinel.

"A first FMCW Lidar demonstrator using the PIC with the Optical Enhanced Arrays (OEATM) will be available by mid of this year," adds Dr Michael Richter, managing director, Scantinel Photonics.