High-Power and High-Speed Multi-Channel VCSEL Arrays with GaN Driver for Automotive LiDAR

As the automotive industry races towards fully autonomous vehicles, diversity in image sensors plays a crucial role in enabling safety in autonomous driving. Apart from radar and camera, time-of-flight (ToF) LiDAR has been well developed as panacea in autonomous driving as it can provide high-resolution mapping of the vehicle’s environment, long range detection and high frame real-time 3D representation (point cloud). High-resolution and long-range LiDAR requires high speed and high current driver for high power VCSEL and GaN HEMT turns out to be the perfect solution [8]–[15]. Compared with discrete single channel VCSEL, monolithic multi-channels VCSEL array is becoming increasingly important as it can provide wider field of view (FoV), high integration and excellent integrity. In this paper, high power density and high integration 8-channel VCSEL driven by GaN HEMTs are proposed. The GaN HEMT with a novel two-stage driving topology exhibits potential application in on-chip integration. Detailed modeling and circuits built of the 8 channel VCSEL are described and Ltspice simulation results are also demonstrated.