SensL Interview

Yole Développement publishes an interview with SensL CTO Carl Jackson and VP Marketing Wade Appelman. These days, SensL is focusing primarily on LiDAR for ADAS and consumer robotics and drones. Few quotes:

"Our core product is the Silicon Photomultiplier (SiPM). The SiPM is a solid-state sensor that is closely related to SPADs (single photon avalanche diode). A simplistic description of SPAD is a binary photon-activated ‘switch’. An SiPM is formed of a close-packed array of SPADs with a summed output. This summed-matrix of SPADs, that forms the SiPM, acts as a quasi-analog sensor that retains single-photon sensitivity upon a large surface area.

SiPMs have very high internal gain and therefore do not require external amplification that would contribute additional noise to the signal. Therefore the SiPM will have a better SNR than the APD in many use cases.

The histogramming ToF approach reveals the time-correlated photons that would otherwise be lost in the background noise of the ambient light and is used to extract the distance measurement."