indie Semiconductor and SiLC Technologies, Inc. have announced a lidar partnership focused on next-generation sensing applications, including ADAS, autonomous driving, robotics, and industrial automation. According to the announcement, indie Semiconductor and SiLC Technologies intend to deliver a frequency-modulated continuous wave (FMCW) lidar platform that integrates indie’s Surya SoC and SiLC’s Eyeonic Vision Sensor for a 10x performance increase versus traditional implementations. Both indie and SiLC say they wish to redefine the benchmarks for rapidly emerging and evolving lidar applications.
4D FMCW Imaging
In its joint press release, indie Semiconductor and SiLC Technologies briefly listed their reasons for choosing FMCW over Time of Flight, including interference immunity, per-point instantaneous velocity, and motion measurement but did not elaborate further on those listed points. According to indie Semiconductor and SiLC Technologies, the lidar partnership will usher in reference platforms that reduce power consumption and cost with improvements in form factor and manufacturability.
“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 of Strategic Marketing at 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.”
“We are excited to partner with indie to bring industry-leading FMCW-based lidar platforms to market,” added Ralf Muenster, Vice President, Business Development and Marketing at SiLC. “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.”
Ongoing Evaluations
Reference platforms featuring Surya and Eyeonic have already been deployed and are currently being evaluated by select OEMs and suppliers. Likewise, both indie and SiLC are actively developing new reference platforms to showcase the scalability and flexibility of their combined technologies.
indie Semiconductor is headquartered in Aliso Viejo, California, with design centers and regional support offices across the United States, Canada, Argentina, Scotland, England, Germany, Hungary, Morocco, Israel, Japan, South Korea, and China. SiLC was founded in 2018 by silicon photonics industry veterans. Investors in SiLC include Dell Technology Capital, Sony Innovation Fund by IGV, FLUXUNIT – ams OSRAM Ventures, UMC Capital, Alter Ventures, and Epson.
