Aeva announces the achievement of a critical milestone for the autonomous vehicles industry: Aeries, Aeva’s next generation Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave(FMCW) LiDAR system that integrates all the key elements of a LiDAR sensor into a miniaturized photonics chip.

Aeva’s 4D LiDAR-on-chip significantly reduces the size and power of the device by orders of magnitude while achieving full range performance of over 300m for low reflective objects and the ability to measure instant velocity for every point-- a first for the autonomous vehicle industry.

Aeva’s LiDAR-on-chip will cost less than $500 at scale, in contrast to the several tens of thousands of dollars for today’s LiDAR sensors.

“One of the biggest roadblocks to bringing autonomous vehicles to the mainstream has been the lack of a high-performance and low-cost LiDAR that can scale to millions of units per year,” said Soroush Salehian, Co-Founder of Aeva.

“From the beginning we’ve believed that the only way to truly address this problem was to build a unique LiDAR-on-chip sensing system that can be manufactured at silicon scale.”

Unlike other LiDAR technologies, Aeva’s 4D LiDAR-on-chip measures the instant velocity of every point on objects beyond 300m.

Aeva’s LiDAR is also free from interference from other sensors or sunlight and it operates at only fractions of the optical power typically required to achieve such long range performance, increasing the factor of safety and scalability for autonomous driving.

Aeva also differs from other FMCW approaches in its unique ability to provide multiple millions of points per second for each beam, resulting in ultra high fidelity data that has been unprecedented until today.

“Not all FMCW LiDARs are created equally,” said Mina Rezk, Co-Founder of Aeva. “A key differentiator of our approach is breaking the dependency between maximum range and points density, which has been a barrier for time-of-flight and FMCW LiDARs so far. Our 4D LiDAR integrates multiple beams on a chip, each beam uniquely capable of measuring more than 2 million points per second at distances beyond 300m.”