The global Guangda market will reach a scale of US$1.6 billion by 2022, and China’s IP developers will be insufficient to start late.

[Global light market will reach US$1.6 billion in 2022, and China's IP developers will not be able to start late enough] Of the many sensors loaded on today’s self-driving vehicles, lidar (light detection and ranging) is the most critical and the most There is a kind of "money pass". Pierre Campou, director of imaging and sensors at Yole Developpement, a French-based market research organization, said that it is difficult for him to imagine that there is no Guangda for self-driving; the agency predicts that the market for Guangda will reach a scale of US$1.6 billion by 2022 and further increase by 2032. It grew to 31.5 billion U.S. dollars.

However, the technology promoting Guangda is still changing, with new developments at any time. For example, senior analyst Akhilesh Kona, a senior analyst of automotive electronics and automotive semiconductors at IHS Markit, a market research organization, said that EETimes visited EETimes and said that Guangda technology suppliers have continued Various beam-steering technologies, including mechanical, MEMS, and solid-state, have been developed to improve the durability, size, and cost of Everlight.

As manufacturers compete to launch even more brilliant Guangda, one question that everyone will want to ask is: Who is the supplier of optical technology leadership? One of the ways to find the answer to the above question is based on the patent file associated with the Everlight technology. Knowmade, the IP analysis and patent evaluation agency owned by Yole Developpement, recently studied the vehicle light-up devices and systems, and confirmed that there are more than 6,480 patent families related to automotive light.

Lidarpatentlandscape's Patent Family Analysis Related to Automotive Everlight (Source: KnowMade)

Although this type of patent activity can be traced back to the late 1960s, the number of relevant patents has exploded in the past few years. In particular, between 2007 and 2017, the compound annual average growth rate (CAGR) of the number of patented technologies reached 21 %. From the perspective of manufacturers, in the early days, Bosch, Denso, Valeo, and other leading patent fields related to automotive use were dominated.

Knowmade's technology and patent analyst Paul Leclaire describes these vendors as "historic IP vendors"; according to his observations, most of their patents are "associated with advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) applications, based on incremental development techniques and limited use. The whitespace area; "the so-called "limited space area" means that it is difficult to apply for new patents if there are other patents that do not overlap, in which case the chances of obtaining a patent application are low.

However, Paul Leclaire, a technology and patent analyst, pointed out that the activities of those historic IP vendors alone cannot explain the increase in the IP of optical technology in recent years; there are many new players in the field of Guangda, which fall into the following categories:

Semiconductor manufacturers' IP

First-class vendors include semiconductor vendors such as Qualcomm, LGInnotek, Ricoh, and TI (Texas Instruments). Leclaire explained that their contributions include the use of non-scanning technology to reduce the size of light, and to increase speed with high pulse rates. The patents of those manufacturers suggest that beam steering technology has become the new darling of the industry, and the market has begun to see some of the composite solutions (detectors and lasers) that are specifically used in the optical industry.

Pure IP provider

Other newcomers include Quanergy, Velodyne, Luminar, LeddarTech, etc. Leclaire said that they are "pure IP operators" who focus on the development of Everest technology. The patent publication focuses on highly specific patented technologies and can achieve product assertions. And its application.

It is worth noting that IP developers from China, such as Lei Shen, Robosense, Hesai, etc., have stated that they are mainly in China for two or three years. Former newcomers who entered the field of IP Optoelectronics technology, most of their patent applications are still awaiting trial, or have not extended to markets outside China; but he also pointed out that the IP of those companies are related to their already listed products. related.

Self-driver

The last category of Everlight technology developers is the self-driving car manufacturer itself; Leclaire pointed out that these manufacturers use Guangda as one of the tools for providing complex embedded sensing systems, such as Google, Waymo, Uber, Zoox, and FaradayFuture. Chinese companies such as Baidu and Chery also own Guangda IP.

According to Knowmade's research, for most self-driving suppliers, Everbright is the central component of its patented sensing solution, and many of their patents are related to computing methods and processes.

As for which potential technologies are expected to accelerate the development of Guangda? Leclaire pointed out two kinds of this, one is the use of new light sources such as laser and vertical cavity surface-emitting laser (vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser) (VCSEL), the other is beamforming (beamforming) technology.

He said that using VCSEL as a new type of laser light source has the advantages of including smaller angular divergence and smaller laser arrays, as well as higher output power. The beamforming method and the beam steering method are more and more often mentioned in the patents related to solid-state light-ups.

So can Knowmade identify which players dominate the new light source or the field of beamforming IP? Leclaire said no, and his team's analysis focused only on vehicle light devices and systems: "We did not analyze lasers, VCSELs, photodetectors, SPADs (single photon failure detectors), APDs, etc. In the IP field of technologies such as photodiode, there is no analysis of the IP field related to beamforming technology."