Solid state LIDAR (electronic optical beam steering)

Coincidentally I have a lidar project going. Quanergy's strength is their scanning technology, which is an array of optical phase shifters. That lets them synthesize a beam just like a big phased array radar.

I haven't seen a lot of details on their detection scheme, nor whether their range and pixel rate specs apply simultaneously.

The big problem for vehicular lidar is the horrible interference from neighbouring cars. (My scheme is immune to that.)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I can see that would be a big problem with scanning LIDAR; beat frequencies between adjacent systems.

With this approach however, because you can send adjacent pulses out in random directions, auto-correlation against your own PRNG can give you a huge system gain.

That's in addition to being able to instantly decide which part of the scene to focus on, of course - another big benefit.

Clifford Heath.

The receiver gets flattened, but for how long? Until the passing beam scanner passes? That's not very long - you miss seeing a few spots you wanted to see - and when it comes around again you've had time to look at those spots again and different spots get flattened.

(Mind you, I did think about building a laser speed-gun flattener: point an appropriate diode forward and pulse it at 1MHz with lots of jitter. The guns also have extensive signal processing, but from what I know about how they work, I think this would prevent it getting a reading.)

Clifford Heath

Nope. The direct beam from a nearby car is many orders of magnitude brighter than the reflection from a distant object. Numbers like 130 dB. Your receiver gets completely flattened, so any fancy signal processing stuff fails.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs