Miniature, wide field of view lidar to target <$100 price point for mass-market ADAS and autonomous vehicles applications

Cepton Technologies, Inc. announced today that it has been named a CES® 2022 Innovation Awards Honoree in the Vehicle Intelligence & Transportation category for its Nova lidar, a miniature, wide field of view lidar sensor for near-range applications. The announcement was made ahead of CES 2022, a global consumer electronics and consumer technology trade show that will be held from January 5-8 in Las Vegas, NV and digitally.

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Nova weighs less than 350g and has a lidar target size of 3.5 cm (W) X 3.5 cm (H) X 7.5 cm (D). © 2021 Cepton Technologies.

The CES Innovation Awards program, owned and produced by the Consumer Technology Association (CTA)®, is an annual competition honoring outstanding design and engineering in 27 consumer technology product categories. An elite panel of industry expert judges, including members of the media, designers, engineers and more, reviewed submissions based on innovation, engineering and functionality, aesthetic and design. The Nova lidar has been selected among a record high number of submissions to this year’s program, signifying the weight of Nova’s technology and design value for the automotive market.

Nova features a miniature form factor and a wide field of view, making it ideally suited for seamless integration into modern vehicles. With a target volume price point under $100, Nova sets a worldwide benchmark with its unprecedented combination of compactness, field of view coverage and targeted affordability.

Nova is designed to help minimize perception blind spots to enhance advanced driver assistant systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving (AD) capabilities.

It aims to address major gaps in proximity detection of objects with current sensor technologies such as cameras, radars and ultrasonic sensors. Powered by Cepton’s patented Micro Motion Technology (MMT^®), Nova enables high-resolution 3D imaging to accurately detect small children, on-road objects, protrusions and road edges etc. to help increase vehicle safety and enable a higher level of autonomy. Compared to some other near-range lidars, Nova achieves a higher field of view in both horizontal (120°) and vertical (60°) directions with significantly lower size, power and weight.

Benefiting from the maturity of MMT and Cepton’s proprietary lidar engine ASIC for advanced signal processing, Nova is built to meet the stringent requirements of the automotive industry. An automotive-grade lidar, it supports ASIL-B functional safety and consumes <3.5 W (typical power). Nova can be elegantly embedded all around an automobile to provide a complete 360° view of a vehicle’s immediate surroundings, without disrupting the vehicle’s design aesthetics.

In addition to automotive applications, Nova can also enable autonomous robotics and ground vehicles for industrial applications.

Earlier this year, Nova was a second-place award winner at the 2021 Tech.AD Europe Awards, in the category of Most Innovative Use of Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning in the Development of Autonomous Vehicles & Respective Technologies.

“The key value proposition of the Nova lidar is its combination of a wide horizontal and vertical field of view, the very compact size, the low power consumption and an attractive volume price,” said Dr. Jun Pei, CEO of Cepton.

“With that, we hope to significantly enhance vehicle safety in everyday passenger cars by making Nova a mass-market lidar solution. In addition, it uses a scaled version of Cepton’s patented MMT architecture that is already in use in the long-range lidars that we are supplying in our major ADAS lidar program with our key OEM customer. We believe that this means that the core technology enabling Nova has reached a high maturity level and is licensable to manufacturing partners, especially automotive Tier 1s.”

Detailed information about the CES 2022 Innovation Awards honorees can be found at CES.tech/innovation. In January 2022, Cepton will join many other honorees in showcasing their products in the Innovation Awards Showcase area at CES 2022. At the Cepton Booth (#5518, LVCC – West Hall), Cepton will also showcase Nova alongside its comprehensive portfolio of lidar solutions for smart mobility, covering automotive and smart infrastructure applications. Please visit the Cepton website for more information.

About Cepton Technologies, Inc.

Cepton provides state-of-the-art, intelligent, lidar-based solutions for a range of markets such as automotive (ADAS/AV), smart cities, smart spaces and smart industrial applications. Cepton’s patented MMT®-based lidar technology enables reliable, scalable and cost-effective solutions that deliver long range, high resolution 3D perception for smart applications.

Founded in 2016 and led by industry veterans with over two decades of collective experience across a wide range of advanced lidar and imaging technologies, Cepton is focused on the mass market commercialization of high performance, high quality lidar solutions. Cepton is headquartered in San Jose, California, USA, with a presence in Germany, Canada, Japan, India and China, to serve a fast-growing global customer base. For more information, visit www.cepton.com and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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