Velodyne Preps for Volume Lidar

The $500 Velarray H800 is aimed at ADAS applications and automated production at scale.

Prior to 2020, there were allegedly 80 to 100 “lidar companies” in the world, depending on who in Silicon Valley was compiling the list. Such was the over-inflated bubble of autonomous mobility prior to the pandemic. How many of those fledglings retain any viability today is anyone's guess, but one thing is certain: Velodyne is real, and remains the best-known player of the lidar world.

So, its announcement last November of the Velarray H800 - first in a new family of solid-state lidars aimed at automotive ADAS and AV applications - continues to resonate among OEMs and Tier-1 integrators. In development since 2017, the H800 is based on Velodyne's MLA (micro-lidar array) technology that uses eight edge-emitting lasers. It also features the company's proprietary photo detectors and its own ASIC microchip - an application-specific integrated circuit designed for a special application.