Image: Honda Motor Europe The development of advanced lidar and AI-based machine vision has received a boost after Honda Ventures invests in SiLC Technologies to develop integrated single-chip solutions. With radar and 2D or 3D vision systems finding it hard to distinguish between stationary and slow-moving objects, and even to detect dark objects (such as tires) at distances over a few hundred metres, the technology is not well suited to safe and trustworthy autonomous driving. The majority of time-of-flight lidar solutions, meanwhile, can be affected by interference...

Using light to move data over shorter distances is becoming more common, both because there is much more data to move around and because photons are faster and cooler than electrons. Using optical fiber for mission-critical communication is already well established. It has been the preferred PHY for long-haul communications for decades because it doesn’t suffer from the attenuation losses of copper. It also has emerged as the dominant way of transferring data back and forth between servers and storage because it is nearly impervious to interruptions, extremely fast, and requi...