Today, Dallas-based Texas Instruments (TI) introduced a new portfolio of automotive lidar, clock, and radar chips to help automakers transform vehicle safety by bringing more autonomous features to a wider range of cars. The company claims industry firsts for the new integrated high-speed lidar laser driver and automotive BAW (bulk acoustic wave)-based clocks, and its new mmWave radar chip offers advanced front and corner radar capabilities.

“Our latest automotive analog and embedded processing products help automakers both meet current safety standards and accelerate toward a collision-free future,” said Andreas Schäfer, General Manager for ADAS and Infotainment at TI. “Semiconductor innovation delivers the reliability, precision, integration and affordability automakers need to increase vehicle autonomy across their entire fleet.”

Schäfer was one of three key execs from the company who briefed the media on the latest innovations just prior to the release of the new offerings. He was joined by Anthony Vaughan, Marketing Manager for High-Speed Amplifiers, and Xiaofan Qiu, Product Line General Manager responsible for Clock and Timing Solutions.

 

Autonomy market drivers

The adoption of autonomous driving features is accelerating right now based on key motivators for the OEMs, according to Schäfer. For some OEMs, SAE Level 2 has become a commodity, expected by customers, and as a consequence, it is accelerating the drive toward Level 3 and beyond. OEMs are aware that added features can break the current loyalties, meaning safer feature sets or more advanced features can drive people to buy a different brand than they have historically purchased.

In general, advancing vehicle autonomy requires more sensor technology and more semiconductors across the whole range of vehicles, and TI is hoping to address these trends with a portfolio that can address all of those systems, no matter if that’s camera, radar, and lidar, and the fusion and required for system processing.

There’s a lot of flux in the market competition among the rapidly advancing lidar, radar, and camera sensor technologies.

According to Schäfer, across TI’s customer base, lidar can be seen as very innovative in some regions, with some customers seeing lidar-equipped vehicles as future-ready. In other cases, there is some OEM concern for vehicle integration from optical or aesthetical perspectives. However, he says that it is a key technology for enabling higher autonomy levels.

Many OEMs are adding lidar to their vehicles for the first time, added Vaughan.

“Lidar is growing by leaps and bounds,” he said, combined with camera and radar in sensor-fused systems. “I think that the three technologies are going to live in harmony, especially as we move towards more autonomous Level 4 and 5 vehicles going forward.”

 

High-speed lidar laser driver

One of the largest challenges for lidar developers is how to create laser transmissions that accurately detect objects at long distances while remaining eye-safe, according to Vaughan. Even with a 1550-nm laser wavelength, it is possible to transmit enough optical power to cause eye damage. A pulsed time-of-flight lidar system must transmit a powerful but short laser pulse to achieve long-distance measurements. Most laser drivers are used to activate gallium nitride (GaN) field-effect transistors (FETs) and produce current pulses with pulse widths of several nanoseconds.

TI’s LMH13000 integrated laser driver does not require an external GaN FET (field-effect transistors) or large capacitor and can drive lasers with rise and fall times of less than 800 ps with less than 2% variation across temperature, achieving up to 30% longer distance measurements than discrete solutions. With integrated low-voltage differential signaling, complementary metal-oxide semiconductor construction, and transistor-transistor-logic control signals, the device eliminates the need for large capacitors or additional external circuitry. The integration supports an average 30% reduction in system costs while reducing solution size by four times, empowering design engineers to discretely mount compact, affordable lidar modules in more areas and across more vehicle models.

As lidar technology reaches higher output currents, vast variations in pulse duration over temperature make it challenging to meet eye safety standards, explains TI. Its laser driver provides up to 5 A of adjustable output current with only 2% variation across its -40°C to +125°C ambient temperature range compared to discrete solutions that can have up to 30% variation. The device’s short pulse-width generation and current control enable the system to meet Class 1 U.S. Food and Drug Administration eye safety standards.

 

BAW-based clocks

In the journey toward more autonomous zone architectures, software-driven decision-making requires precise timing and reliable clocking circuits.

“Every microcontroller, high-speed interface, and data converters require accurate clock references for them to function, and the heart and the center of every clocking device is the resonator, which generates the clock,” said Xiaofan.

From advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) to in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) and high-speed data networks, automakers are implementing the PCIe (peripheral component interconnect express) 6.0 specification, Gigabit Ethernet, and serializers and deserializers (SerDes) to improve safety and enhance the driving experience. At the heart of these connected systems, TI is pitching its new bulk acoustic wave (BAW) clocks, beating with precise timing like a heartbeat, synchronizing vehicle subsystems.

“TI is the first and only company that has productionized [BAW] technology for timing, and we released our first product in 2018 and many new products in the last three years, mainly for the telecom and enterprise data center applications,” added Xiaofan.

With TI’s BAW technology benefits, the new CDC6C-Q1 oscillator and LMK3H0102-Q1 and LMK3C0105-Q1 clock generators increase reliability by 100 times compared to traditional quartz-based clocks, with a failure-in-time rate of 0.3. Enhanced clocking precision and resilience in harsh conditions enable safer operation, cleaner data communication, and higher-speed data processing across next-generation vehicle subsystems.

 

New mmWave radar chip

The AWR2944P radar sensor is a performance expansion of TI’s widely adopted AWR2944 portfolio with enhanced RF and compute performance to meet NCAP+ automated driving requirements.

“We debuted the AWR2944 a little bit more than a year ago, and it is already market-leading in the automotive space, being adopted by various OEMs already,” said Schäfer. “Now the AWR2944P brings front and corner radars to the next level.”

The new radar sensor’s enhancements improve vehicle safety by extending detection range, improving angular accuracy, and enabling more sophisticated processing algorithms. Key enhancements include an improved signal-to-noise ratio, increased computational capabilities, a larger memory capacity, and an integrated radar hardware accelerator that allows the microcontroller and digital signal processor to execute machine learning for edge artificial intelligence applications.

The single-chip mmWave sensor is composed of a FMCW (frequency modulated continuous wave) transceiver capable of operation in the 76- to 81-GHz band, radar data processing elements, and peripherals for in-vehicle networking. The sensor is built with TI’s low-power 45-nm RF CMOS (radio frequency complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) process with its own recipes to enhance RF and compute performance, which is said to enable unprecedented levels of integration in a small form factor and minimal bill-of-materials impact. It is intended for low-power, self-monitored, ultra-accurate radar systems in the automotive space.