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Blog
Silicon Photonics Switching: Empowering AI in the Physical and Virtual World
New York, NY – August 31, 2026 — The scaling of next-generation Physical AI and hyperscale data centers is fundamentally constrained by the physical limits of electronic switching and legacy mechanical systems. As interconnect speeds surpass 1.6T, copper-based electrical paths run into hard limits of reach, power and signal integrity. Voyant Photonics addresses these bottlenecks […]
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Voyant Photonics Introduces Industry’s First Fully Solid-State 4D FMCW LiDAR, Unlocking High Performance Depth and Velocity Sensing to Next-Generation Industrial and Consumer Applications
Helium™ family brings scalable, cost-effective sensing and high-resolution 4D point cloud data to the emerging era of Physical AI New York, NY – December 17, 2025 – Voyant Photonics, the leader in chip-scale frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) LiDAR, today announced its Helium™ Platform of fully solid-state LiDAR sensors and modules. The solution is built on a […]
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“From autonomous vehicles to autonomous everything”: Voyant’s path to chip-scale FMCW lidar
Voyant’s incoming CEO Clément Nouvel talks to Electro Optics about why he took the job, and how fully-integrated FMCW lidar, built on silicon photonics, is moving up the scale. He maps out the technology’s path from autonomous automotive to autonomous everything.
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Voyant Photonics expands Carbon™ FMCW LiDAR Platform with new product extension, unlocking chip-scale sensing to new markets
New York, NY – December 2, 2025 – Voyant Photonics, the leader in chip-scale Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) LiDAR technology, today announced new versions of its Carbon™ LiDAR platform, adding 32-line and 64-line variants designed to bring the power of FMCW sensing to even more compact, cost-sensitive, and compute-limited systems. The new models, which […]
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Physical AI Era: Machines Must Learn to See Before They Can Think
AI has advanced at an extraordinary pace. Yet our machines still struggle to connect spatial awareness to their physical capabilities, a skill that is intuitive for humans. As we enter the physical AI era, the ability to perceive the environment accurately, affordably and at scale will determine which systems thrive—and which fall short.
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LiDAR Innovator Voyant Photonics Names Former Valeo Executive Clement Nouvel as CEO to Lead Expansion of On-Chip LiDAR into the Physical AI Era
New York, NY — October 28, 2025 — Voyant Photonics, a pioneer in on-chip Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) LiDAR, today announced the appointment of Clément Nouvel as Chief Executive Officer. Nouvel joins at a pivotal stage as the company transitions from development to large-scale commercialization of its silicon photonics based sensing technology, enabling machines […]
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Rethinking Safety Scanners: Why Legacy Systems Fall Short
In the world of automation and robotics, safety is non-negotiable. Industries increasingly rely on automated guided vehicles (AGVs) and autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) to streamline operations, and those robots almost universally require multiple scanners rated for functional safety (per ISO 13849 or IEC 61508) to ensure they don’t collide with and harm people or equipment. […]
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The Future Actually Happened
When I was an undergrad I took this rather odd cross-disciplinary engineering class. I was the only EE student in the class, but I realized later I was kind of an odd EE student. One of the topics was in simulated engineering. Super computers in the latter half of the 1980’s had just become capable […]
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Voyant Photonics Enhances Simulation Capabilities with NVIDIA Isaac Sim for FMCW Imaging LiDAR Sensors
NEW YORK, NY, January 8, 2024 – Voyant Photonics today announced a significant advancement in its simulation capabilities by leveraging NVIDIA Isaac Sim powered by the NVIDIA Omniverse development platform. With this new enhancement, Voyant can now achieve comprehensive simulations for its Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) imaging LiDAR sensors, catering to diverse industries such […]
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Using Image Quality FMCW LiDAR as an IMU State Estimator
Using Frequency-Modulated Continuous-Wave (FMCW) LiDAR to replace Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) represents a significant advancement in state estimation for various applications, including autonomous vehicles, robotics, and aerospace systems. FMCW LiDAR is a type of light detection and ranging system that differs from traditional pulsed LiDAR systems. Instead of emitting pulses of light, FMCW LiDAR continuously […]
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Sometimes You Get Lucky
Customers Are Finally Recognizing the Practical Limitations of Time-of-Flight LiDAR When Chris and Steve started Voyant they made all sorts of decisions to get their ideas for chip-based-LiDAR out of the lab and into cars as fast as possible. Like everyone making decisions without perfect foresight, they could not anticipate the impact their decisions would […]
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Ushering in the Digital Age of Photonics
We have built something fundamentally new. It is a coherent 3D image sensor chip. This chip is the solution for bringing low cost, high fidelity machine perception into the mass market. Our chip provides a low power, compact form factor imaging solution that delivers on image quality, range performance and interference immunity. It can image […]
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Science Fiction to Forklifts in < 2 Years
When I first joined Voyant full time, Steve and Chris had so many ideas on where to take their incredible technology. We narrowed the opportunity by focusing on markets where Voyant could quickly introduce game-changing solutions and markets where we could reach customers with immediate needs and who demonstrated fast adoption cycles. Through this narrow […]
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Blinded by Science
Did you know that the reflective safety clothing you wear while biking at night or walking around a construction site could actually make you invisible to some of today’s leading LiDAR sensors? Voyant’s LiDAR sensors have no trouble seeing a nighttime biker, a construction worker, or anyone else for that matter. And we’re just getting […]
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Do You Have a Great Team?
At my next mentor presentation at ERANYC, as at all the previous ones, I will advise the new cohort not to say “We have a rock star team” when they speak with investors. The older I get the less certain I become about offering any wisdom or advice at all, to anyone, about anything. On […]
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The Best (and Weirdest) Future Car Tech at CES 2022
The big themes this year focused on services and experiences that drivers and passengers can have inside vehicles, the advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) and automated driving features that handle some of the drudgery of driving so you can have those experiences, and the compute power needed to deliver it all.
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Why I Don’t Want Point Clouds on Our New Website
Imagine you are a technical person in the UK, just before the outbreak of WWII, about to demonstrate a new defensive weapon to some very important people – maybe the Prime Minister – for the first time. Your audience assembles. You point to a blank monitor and ask your audience to watch. Without any warning, […]
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Voyant Photonics Raises $15.4M in Series A Funding to Deliver 3D Sensing with its Chip-Scale LiDARs
Long Island City, NY – Voyant Photonics (www.voyantphotonics.com) announced that it raised $15.4M in Series A led by UP.Partners with participation of earlier investors LDV Capital and Contour Ventures. Voyant’s LiDAR system, containing thousands of optical components fabricated on a single semiconductor chip, enables its customers to integrate an effective and exponentially more scalable LiDAR […]
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Voyant Raises $15M to Scale Production of its Tiny, Inexpensive LiDAR Tech
The future of lidar is uncertain unless, as Voyant hopes to do, its price and size are reduced to fractions of their current values. As long as lidars are sandwich-sized devices that cost thousands, they won’t be ubiquitous — so Voyant has raised some cash to bring its smaller, cheaper, more easily manufactured, yet still […]
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LiDAR and the Metaverse
Mark Zuckerberg’s recent attempt to reorient public perception of his social media behemoth, from association with the historically successful social media models of Facebook and Instagram to a futuristic image of social augmented reality and digital world experiences, has produced a boom in public conversation about the implications of these powerful experiences, as well as […]
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Ones to Watch – Voyant Photonics
LiDAR is a technology that has been dominated by commercial automotive applications grabbing the headlines – and funding. But Voyant has developed LiDAR in a different direction with on-chip technology…
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The Magic of Voyant
I never intended to get a degree in electrical engineering. I did not even know what that was when I applied to college. I had intended to get a degree in mechanical engineering like my father. The application process at one particular college had a waterfall model on department selection. I picked the department at […]
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Aeva IPO Ushers in the Era of 4D LiDAR — Will 5, 6, or 7D LiDAR Be Far Behind?
Two more LiDAR companies went public the other week through acquisitions by SPAC. Ouster has been producing and selling LiDAR systems for years, yet Aeva has yet to sell anything or even release a public spec sheet describing their product. In their first few days of trading, Aeva has been out-performing Ouster by an impressive margin. Ouster produces time-of-fight (TOF) systems, […]
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A Rose by Any Other Name?
Dear Elon, I am a huge fan of your many accomplishments. Yesterday’s manned launch is nothing short of awe-inspiring. I do not even mind those quirky issues with my newest Model S . So what if I can’t drive it in the rain? That is why I kept the old one. Even though I remain a […]
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Did the New iPhone LiDAR Put Velodyne (and Luminar, and Ouster) Out of Business?
Apple just released the new iPhone 12, and unsurprisingly it includes a LiDAR system like the 3D ranging system launched in the iPad a few months ago. Cutaway view of Sparrow, an imaging LiDAR system designed around a coherent pixel array from Voyant Photonics. I have enjoyed countless hours playing with my LiDAR-equipped iPad. It can measure […]
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Coining a Phrase: LoC for LiDAR-on-Chip
I feel I have missed out on so many chances to coin a phrase for a new technical idea. “AJAX Programming”, was one of many techniques that my team and I were using in the mid ’90’s before anyone had terms to describe it. Plenty of people were doing this, I am sure, but back […]
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Learning About Silicon Photonics
The key to Voyant’s low-cost integrated LiDAR is silicon photonics, a technology platform that leverages semiconductor manufacturing techniques to make optical integrated circuits instead of electrical integrated circuits. Billions of dollars of R&D investments into the electronics ecosystem over multiple decades have made silicon an inexpensive and robust platform on which to build nano-sized structures. […]
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LiDAR-on-a-Chip is Not a Fool’s Errand
“Millimeter Wave Radar is a fool’s errand, and anyone relying on it is doomed!” I didn’t say those exact words, but whatever I did say amounted to the same thing. I laughed out loud as I said them. You would have laughed too, if you saw what I was looking at. I was standing on […]
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Fast data capture with FMCW LiDAR? The answer lies on a chip.
Photonic chips provide the only way forward for FMCW LiDAR for one big reason: multiplexing FMCW LiDAR has many advantages over time-of-flight (ToF) LiDAR, including the ability to measure instantaneous velocity, natural immunity to interference and sunlight, as well as improved long range performance and finer-grained depth resolution. Despite these advantages, it has lagged in popularity […]
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Silicon-based LiDAR — Silicon turns to Gold
The ubiquity of LiDAR is inevitable. Whether it’s autonomous cars which need to navigate safely around obstacles and pedestrians, robots which need to safely work side by side factory workers, or your phone that needs to understand and recognize gestures, the goal is the same. We need to optimize the way machines interact with their surrounding […]
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Press
High Tech LiDAR: The Future Looks Fly
In April, Voyant Photonics, a spinout of Columbia University in New York, raised $4.3 million to develop its solid-state lidar technology based on an optical phased array and a frequency-modulated continuous wave (FMCW) lidar engine…
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Voyant Photonics: A Tiny Lidar Chip With Huge Potential
When developing lidar sensors – size (and cost) have always been an obstacle. Even the most advanced compact lidars, flash lidars and solid state sensors are not that compact. Sure, they are better than the massive, mechanical lidars – but what if you want to apply lidar to something smaller than a car?
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Voyant Photonics Raises $4.3M to Fit LiDAR on the Head of a Pin
LiDAR is a critical method by which robots and autonomous vehicles sense the world around them, but the lasers and sensors generally take up a considerable amount of space. Not so with Voyant Photonics…
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