Quanergy has opened a new production factory located in Sunnyvale, California producing S3 solid state Lidar sensors.
The production line features semiconductor handling and packaging equipment, including photonic IC processing tools and a conveyor system connecting the machinery that turns a silicon wafer cassette into finished Lidar sensors. The facility also includes calibration and final testing, enabling Quanergy to oversee the entire production process and provide reliability in an industry that has thus far relied mainly on manual labour to build mechanical Lidars.
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The manufacturing facility also has the capability to expand to increase capacity based on market demands.
“This manufacturing facility represents our most significant milestone to date in realising Quanergy’s goal to bring capable, reliable and affordable electronically-steered solid state Lidar sensors to mass market,” said Quanergy founder and CEO, Louay Eldada.
“We fully expect these sensors will play an integral role in bringing self-driving vehicles to the road, as the unparallelled solid state reliability and silicon CMOS cost make them only viable sensors for the production of Level 4 and Level 5 (highly and fully automated) passenger vehicles, and will also contribute to groundbreaking applications in industrial automation and security.”
Quanergy has commercialised an optical phased array (OPA) Lidar based on an ultralow-cost mature silicon CMOS platform. The work builds upon an electronic beam steering DARPA-sponsored programme, on which the core team worked in the early 1990s.
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By GlobalDataThe mass production of the S3 enables smart automation based on HD 3D sensing, classification and tracking. The sales price of the S3 currently varies between several hundred and a few hundred dollars, depending on the quantity ordered.
With higher levels of integration in future sensor generations on the product roadmap, Quanergy estimates the price will drop below US$100 per sensor.
