indie Semiconductor, Inc., an Autotech solutions innovator, announced that its advanced LiDAR system-on-chip (SoC) technology has been selected as “LiDAR Solution of the Year” in the third annual AutoTech Breakthrough Awards program conducted by AutoTech Breakthrough.
AutoTech Breakthrough is a leading market intelligence organization that recognizes the top companies, technologies, and products in the global automotive and transportation technology markets. indie won the “LiDAR Solution of the Year” for Surya™, a compact and highly integrated SoC that significantly reduces power, component count, board space and cost when implementing automotive LiDAR systems for the reliable detection of long-range targets.
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LiDAR is a critical sensing technology for achieving maximum levels of safety for assisted and self-driving cars. By gathering data about the environment to process and ensure reliable safety, LiDAR-based long-range sensors are an indispensable technology for enabling the evolution from driver assistance to fully autonomous vehicles.
indie’s SoC incorporates a software-configurable receiver, transmitter, and baseband signal processor. The receiver portion provides flexible high-bandwidth analog-to-digital conversion as well as a hardware-accelerated FFT processing unit. Meanwhile, the transmitter enables waveform synthesis and digital-to-analog conversion, synchronized to both the receiver and optomechanical LiDAR sub-systems. The baseband signal processor is a powerful quad-core Tensilica® software-defined signal processing unit for point cloud generation.
Additionally, the SoC integrates a 32-bit Arm® Cortex® M4F supervisory processor and several I/Os which monitor, control and synchronize LiDAR sub-systems that require analog or digital interfaces such as optical front-ends, global timing references, beam steering devices and inertial measurement units. Thanks to the ability to load all firmware securely from off-chip Flash memory, the SoC retains the field upgradeability of legacy FPGA solutions to support evolving processing and perception algorithms.
“According to a recent report, the global automotive LiDAR market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 28 percent by 2027. Until now, typical LiDAR systems have deployed a very large number of discrete ICs, required complex PCB design and have not been scalable given ultra-high price points for disparate implementations,” said Bryan Vaughn, Managing Director of AutoTech Breakthrough Awards. “Surya represents a major step forward in advancing architectures by reducing design complexity, improving scalability and delivering significant improvements in power, performance and cost when compared to these current architectures, including FPGA-based designs. We are very pleased to award indie Semiconductor with the ‘LiDAR Solution of the Year’ award.”