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Advanced high-performance light sources for LiDAR sensors

The essential components for any LIDAR-related technology in the automotive world are highly integrated, high performance photonic devices.

EXALOS is the leading supplier of wide-bandwidth and high-power SLEDs in the near infrared range (NIR) with wavelengths ranging from 750 to 1700 nm. The EXALOS portfolio includes light sources with different output powers and bandwidths.

The essential components for any LIDAR-related technology in the automotive world are highly-integrated, high-performance photonic devices.

EXALOS is the leading supplier of wide-bandwidth and high-power SLEDs in the near infrared range (NIR) with wavelengths ranging from 750 to 1700 nm. The EXALOS portfolio includes light sources with different output powers and bandwidths.

On route for the uncrashable car.

Advanced light sources are an essential building block of the automotive revolution. Reducing power, complexity and the cost of high-performance coherent LiDAR systems needs optical front-end and laser scanning mechanisms, based on new generations of light sources.

For more than 15 years, EXALOS has been providing industry-leading SLEDs and Laser engines in the Near Infrared range (see below), which are a main building block of modern LiDAR systems.

At the same time EXALOS has built unique design and production capabilities for GaN, GaAs and InP chips and flip-chip mountable chips, to create light sources for every conceivable application.

This includes alignment features for automatic alignment with micron or sub-micron precision during flip-chip bonding, allowing for high coupling efficiencies to single-mode optical waveguides of Silicon Photonic devices.

LiDAR
Infallible eyes for self-driving cars

LiDAR systems are the “eyes” of modern cars. The better these “eyes”, the better the autonomous driving.

LiDAR creates a 3D view by illuminating the surrounding area using a laser, emitting light in the infrared spectrum. The environment is scanned in the horizontal and vertical axes. The result is a so called point cloud: a detailed 3D image from the myriad of reflections, which are detected by receiving photodetectors in the LiDAR sensors.

There are two key approaches to LiDAR sensing:
direct detection and coherent detection.

Direct detection measures the time it takes for individual emitted light pulses (“Time of Flight” or ToF) to return to the photodetector, and the distance to the object can then be calculated from that measurement.

Coherent detection modulates a source signal onto an emitted coherent laser wave. The receiving sensors then detect the environment by comparing the phase and frequency of the received signal to the original.

LiDAR Sensors operate in the 900 ~ 1550 nm near-infrared spectrum.

However, LiDAR operating at 1550 nm enables spatial resolutions that are 2500 times finer than radar’s 4mm when operating at 77GHz. This means LiDAR is ideal for creating very accurate 3D depictions of a vehicle’s surroundings. Incoherent systems (typically Time of Flight or ToF) and coherent systems (typically frequency modulated continuous wave or FMCW) are the key LiDAR approaches for automotive, each with differing trade-offs. indie believes that coherent LiDAR systems offer significant advantages in range, velocity, and reflectivity measurement over incoherent systems, and are also more resilient to other interfering light sources.

The performance and quality of LiDAR sensors depends on their light sources.

EXALOS has been providing light source in the complete Near-Infrared Range for more than 15 years.
Full Cast: Light sources with flexible characteristics and different spectra for the full Near Infrared Range:
EXALOS Technology

Flip-chip bonding of chip to PIC

EXALOS gain chip including PIC alignment areas
PIC chip (not to scale) with matching pillars and recess for chip passive alignment
EXALOS offers customized laser diodes, superluminescent diodes and gain chips with any wavelength emission between 400nm and 1700nm, that can effectively be used for flip-chip bonding to PIC devices.

Thin layers on chip (metal and oxide) and etch depths are controlled with high accuracy and tailored to customer needs. This to ensure an efficient matching to alignment features present on the PIC.

EXALOS offers also the possibility of including a AuSn solder metallization directly deposited over the device p-pad or back-side aligned fiducials on the n-metal.
Additional EXALOS provides unique features for automatic alignment with micron or sub-micron precision during flip-chip bonding, allowing for high coupling efficiencies to single-mode optical waveguides of Silicon Photonic devices.