Lumotive recently announced Sam Heidari as its next CEO as the company transitions its proprietary Light Control Metasurface (LCM) technology into products serving the industrial market. Dr. Heidari is a seasoned semiconductor executive who has led companies like Quantenna Communications, helping it scale in revenues and products over the 2011-2019 time-frame. Quantenna was sold to ON Semiconductors (ON) in 2019 for $1.1B, with 2018 annual revenues of $220M.
The company is based in Seattle, Washington, and counts Bill Gates as one of its investors. Except for the laser chip, the MetaLidar™ Platform is based on a CMOS process. LCMs operate by packing thousands of tunable optical resonators onto the surface of a CMOS semiconductor chip. By tuning the characteristics of each resonator, a phase profile can be created across the surface of the chip which causes incident photons to be reflected in the desired direction. The LCM acts as a programmable, electronically controlled mirror with no moving parts.
The initial product Lumotive expects to launch is the short range (10-20m) M-30, which utilizes a VCSEL array in conjunction with software to enable true Region of Interest (ROI) scanning. By doing this, VCSEL power is directed to regions in the FoV where it is most useful, avoiding brute force approaches which illuminate the entire region where no events of interest are occuring. An API interface to the M-30 enables the customer to direct the laser energy after identifying the ROI (identifying the ROI may require other sensors or algorithms in the customer system). This approach allows for use of very low cost VCSELs. As range and point density requirements increase, the programmable ROI feature ensures scalability in performance and cost. The M-30 will launch into volume production in the 2022 timeframe for industrial and logistics applications. Beyond this, the company expects to address other markets like smart phones, smart glasses and automotive.
Lumotive is at a point now where the technology is mature, customers and markets are eager to embrace solid-state LiDAR sensing, and significant business growth is possible. Dr. Sam Heidari: “I am excited to be joining Lumotive at this exciting phase of its growth, and look forward to building on the excellent progress made by the founding team. LiDAR sensing has enormous potential in the autonomy and productivity space, and I am convinced that Lumotive will be a significant player in this ecosystem”.
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