Solid State Solutions for LiDAR

Todays Situation

Many car accidents are caused by driver inattentiveness or difficult driving situations. Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) already support driver with functions like lane assist, traffic sign information, keeping distance, emergency break. But: Current systems still have weaknesses.
 

Demand

Thinking about autonomous driving, cars have to become smarter to increase safety but also comfort and driving experience.
 

Challenge

Recognition and differentiation of objects and persons. Need for complete 3D environmental mapping including distance and movement information.

Elmos Solid State LiDAR concept heads forward to make environment detection smarter to meet upcoming requirements for new ADAS and autonomous driving. LiDAR serves a wide field of ToF detection ranges and requirements for diverse applications. As we believe in a strong growing need for nearfield mapping, we are focusing our efforts on short and mid range detection. We are also convinced that our solid state solution succeeds over mechanical concepts.

The Elmos expertise lies especially in developing small sized and cost efficient ICs. Regarding ToF, both the Elmos Laser Driver and SPAD Imager present themselves as a perfect pair of products to integrated achievable but powerful and reliable LiDAR systems even in smallest spaces. Learn more about our two innovative products…

Technical Approach

• Nanosecond high-power pulsed laser driver
• Fully integrated multichip die-stack
• Functional safety diagnostics
• Chip-stack-on-board design
• Usable with a variety of standard edge-emitting lasers (EEL) and vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSEL)

Advantages of Elmos Concept Solution

• Optimized for very short pulses at high currents
• Scalable 1-to-n-channel chiplet architecture supports majority of LiDAR applications
• Monitoring of average output power to ensure eye-safe operation
• Cost-effective standard CMOS process
• Automotive qualified

Technical Approach

• On-Chip histogramming for high ambient light tolerance
• Supports various addressing modes, e.g. row-by-row rolling shutter, e-scanning or line-sensor-mode
• High depth-resolution through interpolation
• Integrated data-processing with point-cloud-interface
• Raw-data access for sensor fusion and advanced environment analysis (e.g. fog and rain)

Advantages of Elmos Concept Solution

• High ambient light immunity
• Increased noise immunity
• Massive parallel data processing with multi-channel TDC
• Cost effective standard CMOS process
• Automotive qualified

Discover the system performance of our 16 channel pulsed laser module combined with our 256x16 pixel CMOS SPAD array enabling a detection range of up to 192m with 3mm distance resolution at 30 fps and 905nm wavelength.