Hesai releases ultra-wide-angle long-range LiDAR ATX, which has been designated by many companies

On April 19, Hesai Technology officially released the ultra-wide-angle and long-range LiDAR ATX based on the fourth-generation chip architecture. This product emphasizes extreme performance and extreme cost, and is mainly aimed at L2+ intelligent driving applications. At present, ATX has obtained multiple mass production points and is expected to start large-scale mass production in Q1 2025.

According to reports, ATX is a platform product that uses the mature AT platform that has been mass-produced in the hundreds of thousands, and is equipped with a fourth-generation chip architecture. It has comprehensively upgraded the optical mechanical design and laser transceiver module, taking into account both compact size and powerful performance.

Image source: Hesai Technology

In terms of parameters, ATX is 60% smaller and 50% lighter than the ultra-high-definition long-range lidar AT128, with the minimum exposed window height of only 25 mm. At the same time, the power consumption of the whole machine is reduced by 55% to 8 W.

At the same time, the core performance of ATX has also been fully upgraded. The maximum detection distance of ATX reaches 300 meters, which is 50% higher than that of AT128. It can support up to 256 lines, and the best angular resolution reaches 0.08°x 0.1°, which is more than twice that of AT128. In addition, the horizontal field of view has also reached an ultra-wide horizontal field of view of 140°, refreshing the upper limit of the horizontal field of view of high-performance long-range laser radar.

In addition, ATX is equipped with the world's first intelligent point cloud parsing engine (Intelligent Point Cloud Engine, IPE) developed by Hesai. It has an internal 256-core waveform processing core and achieves fine capture of the full waveform through a high sampling rate of 24.6 billion times per second. Combined with its full-waveform intelligent recognition technology, it can intelligently identify rain and fog, exhaust gas from the vehicle in front, dust, etc., and perform "pixel-level" marking in real time in the point cloud, filtering out more than 99.9% of environmental noise, making the field of view perceived by smart cars clearer.

In order to meet the different requirements of smart cars for lidar performance in different usage scenarios, Hesai has designed a flexible optical architecture to enable ATX to have a 7x optical zoom function and can switch between multiple modes in real time.

Image source: Hesai Technology

It is worth mentioning that ATX is developed from the fourth-generation LiDAR chip architecture platform created by Hesai. Since 2017, Hesai has been building a LiDAR chip architecture platform and has successfully launched four generations of chip architectures. The first to third generation chips have been successfully mass-produced and verified by the market.

Hesai said that the fourth-generation chip architecture uses 3D stacking technology and can integrate 512 channels on a single board. It is embedded with a 256-core intelligent point cloud parsing engine (IPE) and an 8-core APU, achieving 24.6 billion sampling times per second, increasing the detector sensitivity by 130% and reducing the power consumption of single-point ranging by 85%.

With the launch of the ATX new generation LiDAR platform products, Hesai proposed to the industry for the first time two manifestations of Moore's Law in the LiDAR industry: extreme performance and extreme cost. Also based on the fourth generation self-developed chip architecture, Hesai launched the ultra-high performance AT512, targeting L3 autonomous driving applications.

Hesai said that based on the needs of different overseas and domestic OEM customers, these two latest products will help further open up the LiDAR front-end mass production market and accelerate the implementation of advanced driver assistance functions.

According to official data, as of the end of 2023, Hesai Technology's cumulative deliveries have exceeded 300,000 units, making it the first company in the lidar industry to achieve this milestone.