Everybody told us we were crazy.
Told us it couldn't be done.
Couldn't be done at 1550,
couldn't be done in the eye safe region,
couldn't be done economically.
Everybody told us you couldn't do
what we've proven can be done. And I'm at Luminar because we're continuing
to amaze with the technology that we're able to develop
with the team that we've assembled.
Delivering lidar technology to the automotive market to unlock autonomy is hard.
And if you have to sacrifice performance based on what's
available commercially, you're not going to get there.
We recognized very early on that it was critical
that we took our own destiny in our hands and we developed the technology
from the chip level up to unlock the performance we knew was possible.
We quickly realized that vertical integration
would further accelerate our innovation processes.
We have one by one acquired the best in class companies
behind the three key lidar hardware components...
the receiver technology, the ASIC and the laser.
All the magic is done inside the Black Forest Engineering designed ASIC.
We acquired Black Forest Engineering back in 2017.
Here at BFE in Colorado Springs,
we invent and design the custom ROICs and signal processing chips
(or ASICs) inside our Iris sensor. The most important thing
is obviously the economies of scale that come from that little chip.
But the performance that you get by integrating
everything is not possible without the chip level
integration that we do.
Optogration makes the world's best photo detectors.
We acquired Optogration last year and just outside of Boston,
we develop and manufacture InGaAs photo detector chips.
They deliver unprecedented dynamic range and sensitivity.
And this year we acquired Freedom Photonics.
The laser technology that's coming out of Freedom Photonics
not only is unlocking the economies of scale,
but has enabled the next generation, or two, or three coming out of Luminar.
We have the world's cutting edge performance
both in beam quality and in power directly from a laser diode.
There is amazing synergy that occurs
when these components come together inside our lidar systems.
We spent years optimizing our receiver modules
and lidar transceivers right here in Orlando.
Now it's about taking the processes
that we've invented here in Orlando and transferring it over to Fabrinet
where they take that core technology and designs and processes
and scale it up for series production.
We're here today at Fabrinet in Bangkok, Thailand
to work with them to consolidate the gains that we've made in improvements
and to review with them where we're going next.
So as Luminar was looking for partners to be able
to scale our product to automotive volumes and automotive quality,
we needed some partners to be able to do some key assemblies for us.
In particular, the core laser transceiver.
We picked Fabrinet after looking at a lot of options
primarily because they have an unusual combination of experience
with optics, experience with automotive markets and high volume manufacturing.
A lot of our components are quite complex and probably the most complex component
with the most challenging assembly is the laser transceiver.
We're essentially trying to line up our laser
on a very small dot (these APDs) at a range of 500 meters.
So in order to do that, we have a fairly complex station here that
looks at the receiver, looks at where the laser is aligned,
lines them both up in six axes, and then adjusts
that alignment such that we are achieving the alignment that we want.
The relationship has been quite fluid, as we've learned in role lessons learned
from our cycles of learning into the product.
In the last quarter, we've done a lot of work together to do process
tuning, process improvements
that have made dramatic impacts on our yield and our throughput.
Moving forward, we'll continue to dive into PFMEAs and FMEAs to improve
our testing, to improve our process inspection and then to add automation
and to add capacity to be able to get to series production by the end of the year.