Luminar acquires exclusive lidar chip partner OptoGratio

According to foreign media reports, autonomous driving technology company Luminar Technologies announced the acquisition of its exclusive indium gallium arsenide (InGaAs) chip design partner and manufacturer OptoGration. As Luminar and OEM customers continue to mass-produce Iris lidar, this acquisition will bring professional core IP and ensure the security of the supply chain. In addition, the acquisition protects key parts of Luminar's supply chain and enables deeper integration with Black Forest Engineering (BFE), an existing chip design subsidiary acquired by Luminar in 2017. As the company prepares to achieve mass production of products and technologies, Luminar is combining the latest technologies of OptoGration and BFE to enable its fifth-generation Iris lidar chip.

Over the past five years, Luminar has been working closely with OptoGration to develop, iterate and perfect the specialized InGaAs photodetector technology required for 1550nm LiDAR. At its dedicated manufacturing facility in Wilmington, Massachusetts, OptoGration can produce approximately 1 million InGaAs chips designed by Luminar per year, and can scale to 10 million per year.

“Collaborating with OptoGration has significantly advanced the development of proprietary lidar chips and enabled our latest Iris sensors to deliver industry-leading performance,” said Jason Eichenholz, co-founder and CTO of Luminar. “The acquisition of OptoGration is the culmination of a deep technical partnership spanning more than five years. The performance and quality delivered by the OptoGration team in developing photodetectors that meet our increasingly demanding requirements is truly extraordinary, as chip-level innovation and integration are key to unlocking performance and driving significant cost reductions.”

Luminar combines Optogration's InGaAs photodetector chips with BFE's silicon ASICs to create a lidar receiver and processing chip, the world's most sensitive and dynamic range InGaAs receiver of its kind, capable of acquiring and processing gigabits of precise data per second to produce the best lidar data. This fifth-generation proprietary chip currently powers Luminar's Iris sensor. Iris is the only system that meets the stringent requirements of performance, safety, scalability and affordability to enable autonomous driving in mass-produced vehicles.

After the merger, OptoGration's founders will join Luminar and will continue to lead the business with the support of Luminar. William Waters, president of OptoGration, said: "Luminar is an ideal home for OptoGration because we share a common vision of changing automotive safety and autonomy through lidar. In addition, we are both committed to continuous innovation and are surprisingly consistent in combining our technologies to improve performance and reduce costs. Through the merger, we will scale faster and realize Luminar's vision." The acquisition is expected to be completed in the third quarter. The transaction price has not been disclosed, but it will not have a significant impact on Luminar's cash position or number of shares.