INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
When Luminar came out of stealth last year with its built-from-scratch lidar system, it seemed to beat established players like Velodyne at
After the tech proved itself on the road, however, Luminar got to work making its device better, cheaper, and able to be assembled in
quality for quantity, be it known that the production unit is about 30 percent lighter and more power efficient, can see a bit further (250
That means you need a photosensitive surface that can discern just a handful of photons.Most photosensors, like those found in digital
cameras and in other lidar systems, use a silicon-based photodetector
Silicon is well-understood, cheap, and the fabrication processes are mature.
Luminar, however, decided to start from the ground up with its
system, using an alloy called indium gallium arsenide, or InGaAs
An InGaAs-based photodetector works at a different frequency of light (1,550nm rather than ~900) and is far more efficient at capturing it
power draw, but with fewer moving parts.The problem is that indium gallium arsenide is like the Dom Perignon of sensor substrates
engineered around that rather than use the arrays of photodetectors found in many other lidar products
called Black Forest Engineering to design these chips, and finding their paths inextricably linked (unless someone in the office wanted to
volunteer to build InGaAs ASICs), Luminar bought them
The 30 employees at Black Forest, combined with the 200 hired since coming out of stealth, brings the company to 350 total.
By bringing the
designers in house and building their own custom versions of not just the photodetector but also the various chips needed to parse and pass
We only take like a speck of InGaAs and put it onto the chip
Last year the company demonstrated that its systems not only worked, but worked well, even if there were only a few dozen of them at first
But they knew they had to do it eventually
But Luminar seems to be looking further down the road.
