Recently, China's leading single-photon sensor chip company SZLM Photonics Technology announced the completion of a billion yuan financing. The investor is a Chinese electronic technology giant.
SZLM is a domestic single-photon sensor chip developer. It mainly develops large-scale integrated chips for high-efficiency single-photon detectors (SPAD). Currently, there are two main product business lines: silicon photon multiplication for high-performance lidar photon receiving solutions Tube (SiPM), SPAD imaging sensor (SPADIS) and overall dToF solution for consumer electronics.
In April 2020, Apple announced the use of dToF LiDAR technology in the new iPad released. This release made dToF a hot spot for the entire industry, and then the Chinese home service robot giant Cobos applied it in its new flagship sweeping robot DToF, which is the first time in the industry to use dToF technology in the core navigation system of a sweeping robot.
The English name of dToF is Direct-Time of flight, which is literally translated as direct flight time. The working principle is very simple. The transmitting device will first emit light pulses. When the light pulses meet obstacles, they will reflect. It is known that the propagation speed of light is certain. When the distance is different, the time to receive the reflected light is also different. By recording the reflection time of the light pulse, the distance from the light pulse emission position to the object position can be calculated. Repeat this process continuously to draw the 3D shape of the object. In short, the distance of the target is obtained by detecting the flight (round trip) time of the light pulse to obtain the 3D imaging of the object.
What different experiences can dToF technology bring? The answer given by Apple's official: open the limit for augmented reality and wider areas. The augmented reality of the new iPad Pro can give people a stronger sense of reality: suppose you want to change the furniture, but you don’t know the effect of the display, use the iPad Pro with dToF technology to sweep the open space in your room, what you want to match The furniture will appear on the screen. For 3D design engineers, as long as you use the new iPad Pro to scan the object you want to model, you can quickly get the modeling of the object.
3D sensing is showing more and more colorful applications in the fields of mobile phones, automobiles, robots, and security, and has quickly become a hot spot for the entire industry. However, application development and technological lag have also led to the scarcity of high-performance 3D sensor chips, especially in China's domestic 3D sensor development companies, almost all have the pain point of lack of "core". Solving this problem is a market opportunity for SZLM, and it is also the social mission of the team. SZLM is committed to using the world's leading single-photon detector technology to develop and manufacture high-performance photoelectric 3D sensing (dToF) chips, which are used in mobile phone 3D modules, lidars and other high-performance depth sensing systems to help smart hardware achieve three-dimensional perception capabilities The leap.
Single photon imaging sensor (SPADIES)
The core device of the 3D imaging module (dToF) adopts the same technology as the industry-leading post 3D sensing solution. The energy consumption, accuracy, and ability to resist ambient light are significantly stronger than the existing mobile phone rear-mounted 3D technology (iToF).
Silicon Photon Multiplier (SiPM)-a revolutionary sensor chip for photodetectors
Suitable for long-distance single-point ranging. The current product PDE reaches more than 10%, and the dark noise, recovery time, temperature sensitivity index and other performance are all excellent.