[Animats]

The use of OMW Corp, which is just a contract CNC machine shop, indicates the LIDAR in dispute has moving parts. It's probably just another rotating scanner. That approach is just for prototypes. Everybody serious is going with flash LIDAR or MEMS.

If he'd been talking to somebody about custom GaInAs photosensor ICs, that would indicate a more advanced technology.

[Neliquat]

Could be a waveguide... not all machined parts move.

[jacquesm]

Does MEMS count as solid state or is it also seen as a moving part?

[Zigurd]

Probably depends if the service life is in practical terms limited. Offhand I'd guess it's probably very long. MEMS accelerometers in airbag sensors have to stay within tolerances for the life of a car.

[jacquesm]

For sensors I can see how you could do that (piezo with a small weight attached) and it will likely live a very long time. But for an MEMS actuator that would be driven to oscillate it would be a lot harder to make that long-lived.

[Zigurd]

To the extent I can find serivce life specs for MEMS tuning fork gyroscopes, which are driven to oscillate, they say "more than 100,000 hours" - about 10 years of powered-on time, which, for an automotive application like roll-over sensing, is essentially forever, since cars have a low duty cycle.

[deepnotderp]

MEMS would be solid state pretty sure.

[deepnotderp]

GaInAs would imply 1500nm or some non-standard wavelength, at this point I would suspect that normal silicon would do, but you just have to get down to a low enough price point.

[Animats]

That's what Advanced Scientific Concepts uses in their high-end LIDAR units. That gets them the sensitivity needed for flash LIDAR with hundreds of meter range. There are people talking about doing the same job with CMOS technology, and that may well happen, but I don't think the CMOS people have comparable sensitivity yet. Fraunhofer is working on it.[1]

[1] http://www.ait.ac.at/fileadmin/mc/digital_safety_security/do...