Multistep staircase avalanche photodiodes with extremely low noise & deterministic amplification (lidar)


Engineers at University of Texas at Austin and University of Virginia developed a light detector that can amplify weak light signals and reduce noise to improve the accuracy of lidar. Find technical paper here. Abstract "In 1982, Capasso and co-workers proposed the solid-state analogue of the photomultiplier tube, termed the staircase avalanche photodiode. Through a combination of co... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: July 27


Amplifying light for lidar Engineers at University of Texas at Austin and University of Virginia developed a light detector that can amplify weak light signals and reduce noise to improve the accuracy of lidar. "Autonomous vehicles send out laser signals that bounce off objects to tell you how far away you are. Not much light comes back, so if your detector is putting out more noise than th... » read more

Packaging Technology Needs Of Automotive Radar Sensors Chips


Automotive radar systems are typically composed of an antenna, front-end radar sensor and back-end signal processor. Current state-of-the-art automotive radar systems make use of the latest integrated circuit and a wide range of packaging technologies. Let’s look a bit further into the development of automotive radar sensor chips and the packaging technologies being used as solutions for this... » read more

Sensor Fusion Everywhere


How do you distinguish between background noise and the sound of an intruder breaking glass? David Jones, head of marketing and business development for intuitive sensing solutions at Infineon, looks at what types of sensors are being developed, what happens when different sensors are combined, what those sensors are being used for today, and what they will be used for in the future. » read more

High-Fidelity Optical Edge Case Analyses For Lidar Simulation


Advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous vehicles (AV) rely on heavily on four main sensor modalities for perception: radars, cameras, ultrasonic and, most recently, lidars (light detection and ranging). Lidar is a crucial sensor to the ADAS toolset because it can measure precise three-dimensional images (point clouds) of everything from cars to traffic lights to pedestrians in ... » read more

Making Lidar More Useful


Lidar, one of a trio of “vision” technologies slated for cars of the future, is improving both in terms of form and function. Willard Tu, director of automotive at Xilinx, talks with Semiconductor Engineering about different approaches and tradeoffs between cost, compute intensity and resolution, various range and field of view options, and why convolutional neural networks are so important... » read more

Shifting Auto Architectures


Domain controllers and gateways are being replaced by central processing modules and zonal gateways to handle all of the data traffic in a vehicle. Ron DiGiuseppe, automotive IP segment manager at Synopsys, talks with Semiconductor Engineering about how automotive applications are changing, what that means for engineering teams, and how they will shift as AI is increasingly deployed. » read more

Power/Performance Bits: March 30


Harvesting body heat Researchers at University of Colorado Boulder, Harbin Institute of Technology, Southeast University, and Huazhong University of Science and Technology designed a stretchy thermoelectric generator that can be worn against the skin to power small wearable electronics using body heat. The stretchy material polyimine is used as the base of the device. A series of thin therm... » read more

Car Industry Changing Under The Hood


After an initial burst of autonomous activity, the automotive ecosystem regrouped, re-evaluated its goals, and is now ready to begin deploying new technologies made possible by modern development approaches and forward-looking vehicle architectures. The pandemic hurt vehicle sales in 2020, but it also gave the OEMs a chance to catch their breath. Panic over announcements from other carmakers... » read more

Enabling “Triple Vision” – LiDAR Technology For Safe Driving


Cars are becoming safer, thanks to Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) features such as automatic emergency braking (AEB) and driver monitoring systems. These features are becoming ever more sophisticated, making automated driving robust. For instance, AEB began with merely watching cars in front. Now, it detects pedestrians, weaving traffic, cyclists, and objects in the road. Realizin... » read more

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