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Blog
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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Blog
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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Blog
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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Blog
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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Press
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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Blog
Welcome Salam!
We are incredibly excited to announce the addition of Dr. Salam Elahmadi to our team as Vice President of Engineering. Salam comes to us with 20+ years of proven success at large companies like Nortel and IPG Photonics and at start-ups like Menara. Salam co-founded Menara as its Chief Technology Officer and led diverse engineering […]
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Blog
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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Blog
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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Press
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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Blog
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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Press
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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Blog
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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Blog
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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Blog
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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Blog
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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Blog
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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Blog
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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Blog
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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Blog
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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Blog
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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Press
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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Press
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…
Machine perception is within reach
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