Article by Pete Singer for Semiconductor Digest
The automotive industry will make important gains in autonomous navigation and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) in 2025 and beyond. Driven by advancements in the MEMS mirrors used in light detection and ranging (LiDAR), Tier 1 suppliers and automakers will begin to design more accurate, resilient, and affordable perception systems in automotive vehicles.
In the coming year, designers will carefully integrate the more mature automotive perception technologies — cameras and radar — with a more dependable LiDAR that fills the gaps that cameras and radar leave. While cameras provide essential color information, and radar excels in poor weather conditions, both lack depth and high resolution, particularly in recognizing stationary objects or distinguishing between a person and a vehicle. LiDAR provides superior resolution and depth perception, which are essential for safe autonomous navigation across a range of lighting and weather conditions.
Historically, LiDAR has been problematic because it’s highly complex. It requires sub-micron-tolerance on an active alignment system, which is extremely expensive at the micro-scale. It must also function in high-vibration environments with wide-ranging temperature cycles. This fatigues the parts, resulting in tiny wobbles that corrupt accuracy. Since we’re talking about safety-critical navigation systems, that’s a problem we have to fix.
And we are fixing the problem. Autonomous navigation requires a MEMS mirror with a large beam that can hit a 200+ meter range with centimeter-level accuracy. Omnitron has developed the first 3D MEMS step-scanning mirror that meets this requirement. While it’s about the size of a dime, Omnitron’s mirror, at 15mm in diameter, is large enough to move the tens of degrees needed for a wide field of view. It also performs step-scanning, so it satisfies the automotive industry’s requirement for a frequency-modulated continuous wave (FMCW) device. Plus, this new mirror has a very powerful silicon motor behind it, so it’s fast enough for long-range LiDAR. Last but not least, Omnitron’s MEMS mirror can be mass-produced in a commercial MEMS foundry, so it’s affordable in high volume.
The result of Omnitron’s development work is a MEMS step-scanning mirror that meets the various demands of long-range LiDAR – a move that will take autonomous navigation systems to a whole new level.
Click here to read the 2025 Executive Viewpoints in Semiconductor Digest
