Another lidar company completed tens of millions of yuan in financing

In the past three months, financing news has continued to come out in the lidar field. First, Tianmo Optoelectronics completed a Pre-A round of financing of nearly 100 million yuan, and then Tanwei Technology received an A+ round of financing of over 100 million yuan. At the beginning of August, another lidar company, Vision Semiconductor, completed tens of millions of yuan in Series A+ financing.

Earlier, Vision Semiconductor has reached two rounds of tens of millions of yuan in financing with Lenovo Ventures, Silicon Power, Shanghai Industrial Research Institute, Zhejiang University Youchuang, etc. This round of financing was led by New Pupil Capital, followed by several original shareholders, and will be mainly used to optimize product stability, continue to reduce costs, introduce talents and build automatic packaging production lines.

LiDAR real-shot point cloud in the Optometry Park

Entering 2023, "cost reduction" will still be one of the key words for the development of the automobile industry. Reflected in the trend, car companies are no longer obsessed with stacking the number of lidar, but are paying more and more attention to realizing the performance advantages of lidar in order to put more mature driving assistance functions into the hands of consumers.

At the same time, on the other side, LiDAR, which costs tens of thousands of yuan, is also looking for cost reduction strategies to open up a larger market space.

It is undeniable that lidar is a good thing. As the level of autonomous driving continues to improve, vehicles have increasingly stringent requirements for perception capabilities. Especially as L2 develops to L3 or even higher levels, the driver does not need to take over the steering wheel unless necessary, which makes the redundant design of the system particularly important.

To improve perception accuracy and safety redundancy, lidar will be an indispensable part.

At present, lidar is generally installed on high-end models. As production and downstream applications gradually expand, the unit price is expected to continue to decline. Here, the choice of technical route will become a huge influencing factor.

Take Vision Semiconductor as an example. The company focuses on all-solid-state scanning and FMCW ranging. Compared with traditional mechanical scanning radar, all-solid-state lidar means that it does not contain any moving parts, has a relatively simple structure and higher integration, so it can be smaller in size.

Furthermore, all-solid-state lidar includes technical routes such as optical phased array (OPA) and Flash. Taking mainstream OPA as an example, its scanning speed is faster and its accuracy is higher.

For example, Hesai's previously released pure solid-state blind-filling lidar FT120, thanks to its self-developed pure solid-state electronic scanning technology for many years, can integrate an "area array" composed of tens of thousands of laser receiving channels on a single chip, thus Achieve higher point cloud density.

Image source: Hesai Technology 

As for the ranging principle, lidar mainly includes ToF time-of-flight method and FMCW frequency modulated continuous wave coherent detection. ToF technology is widely used, but FMCW can also measure speed while measuring distance. It also has the advantages of high sensitivity, long-distance detection, and anti-interference. In general, the application prospects are more optimistic. 

Gasgoo Automotive has learned that Vision Semiconductor has realized the research and development and production of all-solid-state silicon light scanning chips, and has achieved the first delivery of all-solid-state FMCW lidar based on the "optical switch + grating" architecture. It is currently working with head-on autonomous driving companies. Pretend to cooperate.

Some people point out that the silicon photonic chip of FMCW lidar is expected to become the development trend of the industry. Through chipization, integrating originally stacked discrete devices onto one chip can not only reduce raw material costs, but also facilitate large-scale mass production to a certain extent.

However, judging from the implementation progress, both all-solid-state scanning and FMCW technology still have considerable challenges. In other words, Optoelectronic Semiconductor has chosen a promising but not easy path.

According to the latest report released by Yole Intelligence, the global lidar market size in passenger cars and L4 autonomous driving (including Robotaxi) will increase by 95% year-on-year in 2022, reaching US$317 million. Among them, the total market share of Hesai, Tudatong, Valeo and Sagitar Juchuang exceeds 80%.

Overall shipments are still climbing, but the market potential is huge.

As a start-up company in the field of lidar, Vision Semiconductor was established in 2020. The founder Huang Jinxi is an out-and-out "post-90s academic". Three months after the company was founded, he led the team to create its first Taiwan’s solid-state scanning lidar has achieved business development that has exceeded market expectations so far. Next, as high-end autonomous driving accelerates its implementation, optical semiconductors will also need to face more stringent tests from the market.