Startup Lumotive has introduced what it claims is the world’s first optical digital beam steering light control metasurface (LCM) semiconductor.
The technology is billed to overcome the limitations of lidar sensors in terms of cost, size and reliability, Lumotive said.
While lidar has become the de facto technology for autonomous vehicle testing as well as an important function for advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), it is also being used in many other applications. These include smart cities, indoor mapping, robotics, traffic management, drones, collision detection and even archaeology.
Lumotive said its LCM technology will enable lidar to expand even further into new applications to become the standard for intelligent 3D sensing globally. The LM10 semiconductor is designed for mid- to short-range use cases for autonomous navigation and object tracking.
After eight years of research and development, the LCM semiconductor is now in large-scale production with a reference design offered to users that includes a production-ready lidar sensor built around the LM10 device. This allows users to build LCM-powered products easier, Lumotive said.
"LCM technology, which uses the revolutionary physics of dynamic metasurfaces to actively steer light without any moving parts, is enabling never before seen capabilities in 3D sensing and many other applications where software-controlled optical beamforming is critical,” said Gleb Akselrod, founder and CTO of Lumotive.
