Automotive News: Cepton, Ouster, Voyant Photonics, Mobileye

BusinessWire: Cepton announces its automotive-grade lidar – the Vista-X90, priced at less than $1000 for high volume applications. It is said to set a new benchmark for high performance at low power in a compact form factor. Weighing less than 900 g, the Vista-X90 achieves up to 200 m range at 10% reflectivity with an angular resolution of 0.13° and power consumption of <12W. The sensor supports frame rates of up to 40 Hz.

With a width of 120 mm, depth of 110 mm and a front-facing height of <45 mm, Vista-X90 is compact and embeddable. Its 90° x 25° field of view, combined with its directional, non-rotational design allows seamless vehicle integration - such as in the fascia, behind the windshield or on the roof.

Vista-X90 has a licensable design architecture powered by Cepton’s patented Micro Motion Technology (MMT) – a frictionless, mirrorless, rotation-free lidar architecture. Cepton has licensed its technology to the world’s largest automotive headlamp Tier 1, Koito, who has non-exclusive rights to manufacture and sell Cepton’s lidar technology for an automotive applications, using key modules supplied by Cepton.

“We are excited to disrupt the industry with the Vista-X90, which is the most cost-effective, high-performance lidar in the world for automotive applications,” said Jun Pei, Cepton’s CEO. “Automotive lidars have historically had either low performance at acceptable cost or claimed high performance while being too expensive for many OEM programs. The Vista-X90 fundamentally changes the game by bridging that divide and delivering the optimal mix of performance, power, reliability and cost. This is an integral part of our plan to make lidar available as an essential safety device in every consumer vehicle in the world.”

The Vista-X90 is targeted for production in 2022 and beyond, and samples can be made available upon request.

Yole publishes an interview with Ouster CEO Angus Pacala "A rising star in the LiDAR landscape – An interview with Ouster." Few quotes:

"Since our founding in 2015, Ouster has secured over 800 customers and $140 million in funding. Our headquarters is in San Francisco, and we have offices in ​Paris, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, and Suzhou.

At the time, nobody thought that you could use VCSELs and SPADs to make a high-performance sensor, but we figured out how to do it and patented our approach. The design relies on these two chips with the lasers and detectors, and a lens in front of each chip. In that way, digital lidar really resembles a digital camera."

Voyant Photonics publishes a Medium article "LiDAR-on-a-Chip is Not a Fool’s Errand" with bold claims on its FMCW LiDAR capabilities:

"With every pulse our FMCW LiDAR receives reflectance and polarization measurements that let it differentiate pavement from metal, hands from coffee mugs, street signs from rubber tires, and of course a pot hole from a plastic bag. We expect to read painted markings on asphalt, in total darkness, far past where cameras could. FMCW Lidar is like a sensor from Star Trek. It can tell you where something is, how fast it’s moving, and also what it is made of.

Voyant’s devices are not science fiction. They fit in your hand. They are real. We plan on producing more of them by the end of 2022 than Velodyne has sold across all its products in the last 13 years.

High resolution 3D data generated by LiDAR turns scene analysis and real-time navigation tasks into a 5th grade geometry problem. No need for AI algorithms that simulate a cerebral cortex."

EETimes Junko Yoshida reports that a major Chinese car company Greely adopts MobilEye EyeQ5 chip with 11 cameras for ‘Hands-Free’ ADAS. There is no radar or lidar in the system. The cameras are split in 7 long range and 4 close range ones.

Mobileye SuperVision system consists of two Mobileye EyeQ5 SoCs and is the first public design win for EyeQ5 chip in a production car.