As the automotive industry races towards fully autonomous vehicles, diversity in image sensors plays a crucial role in enabling safety in autonomous driving. Apart from radar and camera, time-of-flight (ToF) LiDAR has been well developed as panacea in autonomous driving as it can provide high-resolution mapping of the vehicle’s environment, long range detection and high frame real-time 3D representation (point cloud). High-resolution and long-range LiDAR requires high speed and high current driver for VCSEL and GaN HEMT turns out to be the perfect solution [8]-[15]. Compared with single channel VCSEL, multi-channels VCSEL array become more and more popular as it can provide wider field of view (FoV), high integration and excellent integrity. In this paper, high power density and high integration 8-channel VCSEL driven by GaN HEMTs are proposed. The GaN HEMT with a novel two-stage driving topology exhibits potential application in on-chip integration. Detailed modeling and circuits built of the 8 channel VCSEL are described and Ltspice simulation results are also demonstrated.
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