With its Lidar for Automotive & Industrial Applications report, Yole Développement (Yole; Lyon, France) continues its research to understand the latest technical challenges and the strategy of each player in the market. Yole's analysts identified strong investments in this sector; competition is fierce and many announcements related to innovative technologies and investments have been made. The swift development of autonomous vehicles has opened many opportunities for lidar, with the established and strongest IP players increasingly challenged by new pure players and international companies entering the IP landscape.
Combining market, technology and IP data, the partners Yole Développement, System Plus Consulting, and Knowmade are offering a wide collection of reports to get a better understanding of the industry evolution, the latest challenges, and related business opportunities.
In addition, the Group proposes a dedicated event taking place in Shenzhen, China: the 2nd Executive Forum on LiDAR for Automotive will take place on September alongside CIOE 2019.
The automotive lidar story began with a race. The DARPA Grand Challenge was an autonomous vehicle race to encourage the development of fully autonomous ground vehicles. In 2005, for the second instance of that race, lidar was introduced. Two years later, in 2007, five of the six vehicles finishing that race embedded a lidar on their roofs. Since then, many companies have made their own prototypes of autonomous vehicles using lidar and carmakers have showed their interest in this technology. The development of robotic vehicles is accelerating, and one leader has emerged.
"Waymo has a fleet of more than 600 vehicles today," said Alexis Debray, Technology & Market Analyst at Yole. "Several announcements have been made about increasing this number up to 82,000 vehicles using Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivans and Jaguar I-Pace SUVs." Alexis had the opportunity to give his vision of the industry and detail the latest technical issues for each type of lidar player at the SSI International Conference 2019. His "LiDAR: from space to roads" presentation is now available on i-micronews.com, SSI International Conference post show report.
On the carmaker side, Audi has integrated a lidar, supplied by Valeo, in the A8 since the end of 2017. It is now expanding this feature to other vehicles such as the Q8, A7 and A6 as an option.
Yole anticipates the total lidar market to reach $6 billion dollars by 2024 with 70% of the total market dedicated to automotive applications. Driven by lower production costs and the emergence of new technologies, lidar is becoming a key component for automotive applications and we expect this market to explode, with a 64% CAGR between 2018 and 2024.
Under this dynamic context, System Plus Consulting, part of Yole Group of Companies including Yole and Knowmade has deeply analyzed the innovative laser scanner developed by Valeo and Ibeo. Named SCALA, this laser scanner was developed through the strategic partnership between both players, to propose a mechanical 3D scanner laser capable of identifying objects and measuring the distance in any environment. This innovation has been designed for vehicles with ADAS and autonomous driving functions.
The laser selected by Valeo and Ibeo is a high-power pulsed laser diode based on EEL diode technology from Laser Components. The three stacked active layers deliver a peak power of 75 W in 150 ns long pulses. The laser comes in a can package. In parallel, ToF is measured by an avalanche photodiode array developed by First Sensor. This company proposes a silicon-based device, assembled thanks to a low-cost PCB package with a glass window. The two main optical components are assembled on the same PCB.
System Plus Consulting's SCALA reverse engineering & costing report is a complete teardown analysis, including BOM , manufacturing cost and selling price estimation. It also includes a complete physical analysis of the laser diode and the avalanche photodiode.
Technological requirements for autonomous driving are still blurred today and might evolve in a new future to more sensors, different types of sensors, and much more computing capabilities according to Yole.
SOURCE: Yole Développement; http://www.yole.fr/Lidar_Market_Status.aspx#.XK0RHth7nDc
