Cepton, Inc., a Silicon Valley innovator and leader in high performance lidar solutions, announced the release of Komodo, its proprietary lidar point cloud processor ASIC(Application-Specific Integrated Circuit) chip.

Supported by Cepton’s deep experience in industrializing automotive lidar for volume production through the company’s flagship ADAS lidar series production program, Komodo successfully achieved production-ready status and is expected to begin shipping in Q2 2023.

Developed in-house at Cepton’s headquarters in Silicon Valley, Komodo will be integrated into several models of Cepton lidars, setting new industry-wide benchmarks for lidar performance and price.

Komodo is a highly integrated custom SoC(System on Chip) designed to maximize the technical advantages of Cepton’s patented lidar architecture to significantly improve point cloud quality while replacing several merchant silicon devices to dramatically reduce cost.

“Our goal is to ultimately offer our customers a customizable black-box solution with built-in perception capabilities,” said Dr. Jun Pei, CEO and Co-founder at Cepton. 

“Since 2019, we’ve had a vision of developing a comprehensive chipset through a series of ASICs covering front-end signal processing, back-end point cloud processing and eventually perception capabilities all within the lidar unit. We started with our own signal processor ASIC, Iguana, and now we are proud to unveil Komodo.

“In the context of the U.S. CHIPS bill, we see the increasing importance of minimizing reliance on the semiconductor supply chain by using our own ASICs. Cepton will continue to drive its ASIC development and expand its leadership in automotive lidar at the chip level.”

In early lidar products, lidar sensors typically relied on FPGAs(Field-Programmable Gate Array) and merchant silicon devices to generate a 3D point cloud. This prevents lidars from being optimized for mass-market commercialization, as FPGAs and merchant silicon devices result in higher costs, lower efficiency, bigger size and higher power consumption. 

The reliance on FPGAs and merchant silicon devices also makes lidar manufacturers more susceptible to supply chain vulnerabilities.