Partnership to deliver world-class FMCW LiDAR solution

indie Semiconductor and SiLC Technologies, Inc have entered a LiDAR partnership that facilitates coherent detection-based LiDAR platforms for next-generation sensing applications, including driver assistance, autonomous mobility, robotics and industrial automation. This partnership will deliver fully integrated vision system platforms deploying FMCW detection, redefining benchmarks for rapidly emerging LiDAR applications.

FMCW-based LiDAR supplies multiple real-world benefits compared to direct detection-based ToF solutions, including long-range with high precision, interference immunity, per-point instantaneous velocity and motion measurement. This ground-breaking partnership connects products from the companies into reference platforms that allow an order of magnitude improvement in sensing performance, manufacturability, power consumption, form factor and cost relative to competing systems. 

“indie is excited to partner with SiLC to bring the processing innovation from Surya to FMCW LiDAR, offering a breakthrough reference design,” said Chet Babla, senior vice president, strategic marketing at indie Semiconductor. “By combining the software-defined high-performance - but low power - analog and digital processing and system control capabilities of Surya™, coupled with SiLC’s Eyeonic vision solution, system integrators and OEMs are enabled with 4D FMCW imaging for mass market deployment into multiple applications.”

Ralf Muenster, vice president, business development and marketing at SiLC, added, “We are excited to partner with indie to bring industry-leading FMCW-based LiDAR platforms to market. Our state-of-the-art FMCW LiDAR sensor features the highest integration, resolution, precision, and longest range of any other competing approach while remaining the only commercially available solution to offer polarisation information.”  

Driven by strong market demand, reference platforms featuring Surya and Eyeonic have already been deployed. They are being evaluated by select lead automotive, tier one and industrial OEMs, and the companies are actively developing new reference platforms to showcase the scalability and flexibility of their combined technologies.