Echo Detection Using Differentiation for Compact LIDAR Implementation

Lidars are gaining popularity in the automotive domain especially in the field of autonomous driving systems. Development of multi-channel monolithic Lidars could reduce the system cost and size for better integration into automobile components. Since Lidars work on the principle of time of flight, an important function of the Lidar system is to precisely detect the time of arrival of the received light pulse. A method is being proposed in this paper to detect the peak location in the received Lidar signal using differentiation. With a single chip solution, the proposed method can improve the footprint of the analog signal chain by 30% thereby saving the overall chip area.