SiLC Technologies and indie Semiconductor have partnered to enable coherent detection-based lidar platforms for next-generation sensing applications, including driver assistance, autonomous mobility, robotics and industrial automation.
The FMCW lidar solution will integrate Indie’s Surya SoC and SiLC’s Eyeonic Vision Sensor to deliver fully integrated vision system platforms that use frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) detection.
Compared to direct detection-based time of flight (TOF) solutions, FMCW-based lidar provides an array of advantages such as long-range with high precision, interference immunity, per-point instantaneous velocity and motion measurement.
Products developed by both companies will be combined into reference platforms to enable “significant 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, 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, SiLC, said, “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 polarization information.”