Lidar chips are essential products in the development process of new energy vehicles and smart cars. At present, the all-solid-state OPA 2D LiDAR chip has been successfully piloted and the development of the OPA 3D LiDAR chip is in progress in parallel.
Lidar is like a human eye, in addition to being a necessity for the development of the new energy vehicle and smart car industries, it also has significant applications in other industries, and if it can be better industrialised, it will drive the development of more opto-electronic fields.
The development of chip-level photonics is fuelling the development of artificial intelligence. The potential for combining photonics and artificial intelligence is huge, and artificial intelligence-based devices and systems, such as robots, autonomous driving, driverless cars and drones, will rely heavily on optoelectronic chips such as LiDAR to achieve intelligence and practicality. All-solid-state optical phased array (OPA) LIDAR technology is a new type of waveguide controlled beam pointing radar technology. According to Chen Haitao, the technical director of Yangzhou Qunfa, there are currently four main LIDAR technology routes in the market.
I. Mechanical LIDAR, which has the advantage that the technology is relatively mature and has reached mass production, but also has the very obvious disadvantage of being relatively large, costly and less stable and durable due to the presence of a large number of mechanical components.
II. MEMS LIDAR technology, also known as pan-mechanical LIDAR, has the advantages of small size, simple structure and a significant reduction in price compared to mechanical radars, but is complex to assemble, has a short lifespan, is difficult to mass produce and has limited scanning angles.
III. Flash LIDAR technology, because it does not have a dynamic scanning device at the speed of light, has a stable system with a very high refresh frequency, but it consumes more energy and poses certain safety risks to the operator, so normally Flash LIDAR can only be used as a secondary sensor and not as a primary sensor.
IV. OPA LIDAR technology, compared to other three radar products, OPA LIDAR does not require mechanical rotation to achieve the scanning of the beam in space, its response speed, flexibility, high accuracy, low cost, small size, all solid state in the observation of high-speed motion targets, synchronous tracking of multiple targets and other aspects have highlighted the obvious advantages, so in the unmanned driving, robotics, intelligent security and other aspects of a very wide range of application prospects, and is now recognized as one of the ultimate development direction of LIDAR technology.
