Silicon Photonics Revive LiDAR Battle

Is there a second life for western LiDAR suppliers? Clement Nouvel, former Valeo LiDAR CTO, and now Voyant Photonics CEO, bets big on silicon photonics by squeezing itself in a small market window.

Voyant’s FMCW lidar platform is based on its silicon photonics chip (PIC) that enables new levels of integration and performance for a fully solid-state lidar solution. It uses a dense two-dimensional photonic focal plane array with fully integrated 2D on-chip beam steering. (Source: Voyant)

Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) sensors, once deemed indispensable for highly automated vehicles, have lost some cachet over the past few years, especially in the West.

This reversal forced some in the automotive field to wonder if there’s a second life for Western LiDAR suppliers.

Clement Nouvel was once known as “Mr. LiDAR” at Valeo, a French automotive Tier One. He is now CEO of Voyant Photonics (New York). He believes that a new technology such as silicon photonics module-based Frequency-Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) LiDAR could change the global LiDAR landscape.

Nouvel is betting that Voyant, a six-year-old startup, can open numerous new LiDAR applications, including forklifts in warehouses, Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) and Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs).

Attempt to pivot

Although many LiDAR companies have sought applications beyond automotive, results have been disappointing. The problem is that once you’ve committed to serving an automotive OEM with your LiDAR, you preserve very little bandwidth to do anything else.

Traditional Time-of-Flight (ToF)-based LiDARS have progressed but are known to have issues with reliability (crosstalk and blooming), integration limits and cost.

Market forces have also occasioned drastic ups and downs in the LiDAR business. For example, the LiDAR investment frenzy, driven by excitement over autonomous vehicles, triggered the Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPACs) movement. Another factor is the momentum built by Chinese LiDAR suppliers such as Hesai, RoboSense and Huawei, feeding the rapidly growing domestic EV market in China.

A very small window of opportunity

Nouvel stressed that the opening for Western LiDAR companies like Voyant to leapfrog their Chinese competitors is “very small — maybe a few years.”

Indeed, the 2025 report by Yole Group shows that today, Chinese LiDAR suppliers account for 93% of the passenger car market and 89% of the total LiDAR market.

“Western players’ attempt to go to China [with their LiDARs] has been completely defeated,” said Nouvel. “I don’t think the Chinese automotive market is a place where any of us can enter.”

However, in Nouvel’s assessment, Chinese LiDAR companies “are lagging behind” the West, because “they’ve been investing mostly in the time of light (TOF) LiDARS, and they are not using silicon photonics.”

He added, “So, the time to jump ship to, and lead the market with Silicon Photonics-based FMCW LiDARs is now.”

Pierrick Boulay, principal analyst for Automotive Semiconductors at Yole Group, cautioned that even though China is focused on developing good-enough ToF LiDAR to meet Chinese OEMs’ demand doesn’t mean they are not looking at FMCW LiDAR.

“Some companies like LuminWave or LightIC Technologies are working in this area. Leading players such as Hesai and RoboSense are also developing this technology in anticipation of the next generations of LiDAR.”

Two conditions to join Voyant

Voyant’s co-founders come from Columbia University’s renowned Lipson Nanophotonics Group lab, headed by Professor Michal Lipson, a leader in silicon photonics research.

Founded in 2018, Voyant already has six generations of silicon photonics technology under its belt. Its goal is to create small, affordable LiDAR sensors for applications like autonomous vehicles and robotics.

However, when Nouvel was recruited to head Voyant, he laid out two conditions. First, he made it clear, “I’m not in if you want to develop the next LiDAR for automotive.” Second, he said, “I am not interested in joining, if Voyant wants to become an automotive tier one company to supply the next LiDARs.”

He stressed, “I’m only in if we develop LiDAR for a much wider range of applications, including these robots in this new physical AI world.”

Despite their potential, LiDARs were tasked to solve some of the most difficult problems in automotive — such as autonomous driving at high speed and applying lidars to personal vehicles that remove humans from the loop. Many investors did not realize that the technology, cost and scale of current LiDARs made these solutions almost impossible to deliver.

Why Silicon Photonics?

FMCW LiDAR is generally considered superior to conventional ToF LiDAR.

FMCW LiDAR directly measures velocity, offers natural immunity to sunlight/interference, provides better range resolution, and handles reflections better. Not all FMCW LiDARS use silicon photonics technology. Voyant is depending on the quality of its silicon photonics module to set itself apart from competitors in the FMCW LiDAR market.

Asked about the virtues of silicon photonics technology in LiDARs, Eric Mounier, Yole Group’s chief analyst on photonics, explained: “One of the main advantages of using silicon photonics technology for LiDAR is related to the integration level. The photonic package can integrate the laser, modulators, beam steering and detector.”

Other key advantages include “the cost reduction opportunity.” He said that silicon photonics “leverages standard semiconductor processes leading to a very low cost per chip at scale and high reproducibility.” Silicon photonics is also more reliable.

The good news is that LiDAR “will benefit from how datacenter optical transceivers have evolved,” he explained. The technology is similar and silicon photonics can be co-packaged with driver electronics and DSP engines.

Voyant’s roadmap

Nouvel explained that Voyant’s focus has been on “developing [silicon photonics] chips and fine tuning how the company can design those chips with the right yield and the right performance, while not being reliant on the silicon process that is too expensive.”

In the long run, Nouvel doesn’t necessarily envision Voyant as a LiDAR supplier. Its mission is to become a leading technology developer and supplier of silicon photonics modules, just as Sony has become a dominant CMOS imaging sensor company in the broader digital vision/camera market.

Voyant unveiled its Carbon family of FMCW lidar products at CES 2025. The Carbon family comes with a silicon photonics module whose chip can scan the vertical line with 128 channels. Nouvel called it “pure innovation,” because silicon photonics chips used for AI data centers “are mostly switching between a small number of channels – maybe four or eight,” not 32, 64 or 128 lines, he explained. “What’s super important in silicon photonics is whether we can get the chips to do what we want them to do.”

Volume production of Carbon family products is expected to start in the second quarter of 2026.

At CES 2026 Voyant is expected to announce an advanced solution that features a 2D FMCW architecture and 4D point cloud data capabilities.

Competitive landscape

While FMCW LiDARs based on silicon photonics technology are still new, there are already 15 to 20 companies building them, according to Yole’s Boulay.

“U.S. companies are very active,” he noted. They include Aeva, Analog Photonics, Aurora, SiLC Technologies and Voyant.

Among Voyant’s competitors, SiLC appears to stand out due to its maturity as an FMCW developer. While acknowledging that, Nouvel claimed, “We feel that our advantage is in the area of integrated, on-chip beam steering, which is key to eliminating the complex mechanical parts of current sensors.” In his opinion, “Voyant is ahead of them and the rest of the market in implementing 1D or 2D beam steering on chip which is the level of integration needed to address the larger (and expanding) market.”

Automotive: Off the table?

The question remains whether Voyant will stick to non-automotive applications, instead of chasing Car OEMs.

Yole’s Boulay suspects that Voyant could sell packaged photonic chips to integrators and help them design the entire LiDAR, mimicking SiLC or Lumotive.

Experience in the silicon photonics module is the strength of Voyant. Boulay said, “My best guess for Voyant in the automotive market would be to sell this packaged photonic chip to a European LiDAR manufacturer for example (or any other). Silicon Photonics and FMCW are not easy to access and if established LiDAR manufacturers want to move in this direction. This solution could be a win-win for both Voyant and an automotive LiDAR manufacturer.”

Indeed, earlier this month, Aeva, a fellow FMCW lidar supplier, announced a design win with an unnamed “top European passenger OEM.

According to the announcement, the deal is for Aeva to become its exclusive LiDAR supplier for its global series-production vehicle platform to enable Level 3 automated driving. Boulay believes that this is one of the paths Voyant can follow.

Silicon Photonics: Integration challenges

In the view of Yole’s Mounier, silicon photonics is no cakewalk, especially when it comes to integration.

Voyant’s latest 4D FMCW lidar, to be demonstrated at CES 2026, is offered as a module that can be configured to meet the cost, size, performance and integration requirements of a variety of industrial and consumer applications, in an ultra-compact, rugged design. (Source: Voyant)

“Packaging is still a challenge for Silicon Photonics,” he said. “There are testing and integration challenges at each level of the LiDAR module.”

These include:

• Integration of laser and / or photodiode on the photonic chip,

• packaging of the photonic chip,

• integration of the packaged photonic chip in the LiDAR module.

Added to the integration issue is heat management, Mounier pointed out. ToF LiDAR is similarly challenged, but for Silicon Photonics, poor thermal management can strongly affect the efficiency and performance of the LiDAR.