Next generation opto-electronics in automotive engineering

 

The latest generations of cars now carry technology borrowed from industries ranging from machine learning to medical imaging, contributing to enhanced hazard detection, camera operation and autonomous functions.

 

In this episode, Florian Friedl from Hamamatsu Photonics joins us to talk about the role of their light sensing technologies play in modern motor vehicles, and what the future may hold for the cutting edge of photon detection.

 

Find more from Hamamatsu at their website.

 

Image source: Scharfsinn/ Shutterstock

 

Transcript:

 

The following transcript is automatically generated.

 

00:00:06 Will Mountford

Hello I’m will welcome to research pod.

 

00:00:09 Will Mountford

Once Upon a time, a car was as simple as an engine, wheels, steering, and a seat.

 

00:00:15 Will Mountford

That was a long time ago.

 

00:00:17 Will Mountford

The latest generations of cars now carry technology borrowed from industries ranging from machine learning to medical imaging.

 

00:00:24 Will Mountford

Today, and speaking with Florian Friedl, group leader automotive optoelectronic components from Hamamatsu Photonics about the role of their light sensing technologies play in modern motor vehicles and what the future may hold for the cutting edge of photon detection.

 

00:00:42 Will Mountford

And joining me to discuss their work, Florian Friedl from Hamamatsu.

 

00:00:47 Florian Friedl

Hi Will.

 

00:00:47 Florian Friedl

Nice to see you.

 

00:00:49 Will Mountford

Nice to have you to join us for the folks at home.

 

00:00:51 Will Mountford

Could you tell us a bit about yourself?

 

00:00:53 Will Mountford

Some of your work background or the steps that led you to where you are now?

 

00:00:57 Florian Friedl

Yes, sure.

 

00:00:58 Florian Friedl

So my name is Florian Friedl.

 

00:01:00 Florian Friedl

I work for Hamamatsu, for the automotive sales team in Germany and Europe.

 

00:01:06 Florian Friedl

I’m responsible for our technical working group, automotive.

 

00:01:10 Florian Friedl

That’s the strategic planning for us in.

 

00:01:13 Florian Friedl

I’ve been working with Hamamatsu for the past 10 years now and I am in the leader position since the last three years.

 

00:01:21 Will Mountford

And can you tell us a bit maybe about Hamamatsu as the whole company overall and where your photonics works fits in?

 

00:01:28 Florian Friedl

Happily, yeah.

 

00:01:30 Florian Friedl

So Hamamatsu is a big optoelectronic company.

 

00:01:33 Florian Friedl

We basically do everything that has to do.

 

00:01:36 Florian Friedl

Light our main roles are for medical and industrial markets, for the medical, that’s a lot of dental application like X-ray scanners and something like this for industry.

 

00:01:49 Florian Friedl

You can find this everywhere.

 

00:01:50 Florian Friedl

You can find light sensing.

 

00:01:52 Florian Friedl

Basically that starts with your mobile phones to detect the ambient light and adjust the display.

 

00:01:58 Florian Friedl

Brightness and color.

 

00:01:59 Florian Friedl

The same goes for KVS.

 

00:02:01 Florian Friedl

We are involved in drone business for LIDAR scanning or some camera applications, stuff like that, but also very simple photo diets or avalanche photo diets that are used in small devices or so.

 

00:02:14 Will Mountford

And that’s some very modern examples.

 

00:02:15 Will Mountford

Mobile phones and drone technology.

 

00:02:18 Will Mountford

It’s maybe a little bit of a surprise to some listeners as it was to me when I started reading about your work that cars and automotive engineering has a place in the field of light research.

 

00:02:28 Will Mountford

So how do those two relate to what exactly does your work, the niche it fills?

 

00:02:35 Florian Friedl

We are already in the cars since 25 years with our optical technologies. The thing with our sensors is that you probably won’t see them as powered by Hamamatsu or stuff like that.

 

00:02:47 Florian Friedl

We are already quite common in the cars and almost all of the LIDAR systems that you have driving around in in Europe and the US are already using.

 

00:02:55 Florian Friedl

Or sensors actually, but you will never know because it’s on component side and usually you just know which tier one has the stamp on the box or sometimes not.

 

00:03:05 Florian Friedl

Even that.

 

00:03:06 Florian Friedl

So it’s nothing new, but of course with the miniaturization and everything that is going on right now in the general market, all these optical technologies also become more and more important.

 

00:03:18 Florian Friedl

For the cars.

 

00:03:19 Florian Friedl

Past applications are simply like reach your mirrors that automatically dim the brightness when you have someone glaring from behind.

 

00:03:29 Florian Friedl

But also like optical communication via plastic optical farther and the cars for infotainment, TV displays and radio connections and stuff like that.

 

00:03:40 Florian Friedl

But I do expect that our sensors will get quite more common, especially with the rise of the lighter sensors that we expect in the next couple of years.

 

00:03:49 Florian Friedl

When going to these higher autonomous driving functions or even to full autonomous cars in the future.

 

00:03:56 Will Mountford

To kind of connect to your own personal history, quite apart from professional.

 

00:04:00 Will Mountford

Were you one of those kids who was into cars and now gets to work on them full time?

 

00:04:05 Florian Friedl

Actually, no.

 

00:04:07 Florian Friedl

Maybe that’s a very unpopular opinion, but I’m not so into cars and not so into driving cars.

 

00:04:14 Florian Friedl

I’m rather already looking forward to the autonomous driving cars so you can spend the time you have to spend in the car with something else.

 

00:04:22 Will Mountford

Doing something that you’d actually like?

 

00:04:24 Florian Friedl

Yeah, exactly.

 

00:04:26 Florian Friedl

I’m a sales guy, so I have to drive around a lot.

 

00:04:29 Florian Friedl

And the time you spend in the car really gets sometimes a bit boring.

 

00:04:33 Will Mountford

I suppose at least you get to spend your days making that autonomous future a little bit closer.

 

00:04:37 Florian Friedl

Exactly, yeah.

00:04:44 Will Mountford

 

The daily operations of Hamamatsu in the current fleet of vehicles, as you’ve mentioned, some of the older technologies with rearview mirrors and the entertainment, but bringing that automotive future, you know, closer and closer.

 

00:04:56 Will Mountford

Are you in any of the current generation of, you know, smart vehicle as electric cars, things that people look at?

 

00:05:03 Will Mountford

On the road and go oh that.

 

00:05:04 Will Mountford

Is very new.

 

00:05:05 Florian Friedl

We are in some of the very new cars.

 

00:05:07 Florian Friedl

I’m not allowed to tell any specific models here. Of course.

 

00:05:11 Florian Friedl

Usually it’s rather these at the moment at least, it’s these very expensive high end cars that already have implemented these rather expensive ADA.

 

00:05:20 Florian Friedl

Systems including a LIDAR, maybe?

 

00:05:23 Florian Friedl

Something like this?

 

00:05:25 Will Mountford

And when we say ADAS systems, what does that mean?

 

00:05:28 Florian Friedl

Adas means advanced driver assistant systems, and these are the systems that will enable the autonomous driving car.

 

00:05:36 Florian Friedl

Or right now they enable the assistance functions like highway pilots or traffic jam assist.

 

00:05:42 Florian Friedl

Something like this.

 

00:05:43 Will Mountford

Now it is I.

 

00:05:44 Will Mountford

Think one of the core truths of the world, that engineering is filled with many acronyms and abbreviations, and going to deal with some of those talking about your.

 

00:05:52 Will Mountford

Research and it’s going to spend a lot of our time talking about MPCS and S Ipms and SP ads.

 

00:05:59 Will Mountford

So if we could maybe summarize what some of.

 

00:06:01 Will Mountford

Those parts are.

 

00:06:02 Will Mountford

And then how your work puts them.

 

00:06:04 Will Mountford

Altogether, with all of the research and the work that you do.

 

00:06:08 Florian Friedl

So we are mainly talking about as you just said.

 

00:06:10 Florian Friedl

PPCS and SPCS.

 

00:06:13 Florian Friedl

That’s the Hamamatsu brand.

 

00:06:15 Florian Friedl

Names for silicon PMS and SPAD arrays.

 

00:06:19 Florian Friedl

So MPC stands for multi pixel photon counter and that is the same as the silicon photomultiplier tube.

 

00:06:27 Florian Friedl

So that’s a sensor that is amplifying the light.

00:06:30 Florian Friedl

By roughly 1,000,000.

00:06:32 Florian Friedl

SPCS are single pixel avalanche diodes.

00:06:36 Florian Friedl

These are sensors that can detect even single photons of light.

00:06:41 Florian Friedl

So so very, very low amounts of lights from technology point of view they are very similar.

00:06:47 Florian Friedl

So we talk about both of them in parallel basically.

00:06:51 Will Mountford

OK, to compare them to say a digital camera which has a sensor at the back which takes in light and transforms it into electrical information for digital storage.

00:07:00 Will Mountford

What kind of scale are the multi pixel photon counters and the single pixel photon counters working at compared to the camera in my phone or the sensor in a DSLR?

00:07:11 Florian Friedl

Something compared to a regular camera chip.

00:07:14 Florian Friedl

Let’s say they have a built in amplification within each pixel.

00:07:20 Florian Friedl

So we are also talking about 2D arrays very similar to a camera sensor, but the resolution is of course much much lower, so you cannot compare it to like 4K resolution or HD resolution or something like this. It’s much lower, but the sensitivity of each of these sensor pixels is much higher.

00:07:39 Florian Friedl

Up to an extent that you with spats can even detect only one one photon coming in.

00:07:46 Will Mountford

And why would anyone want to be detecting just a single photon?

00:07:50 Will Mountford

What are the applications for?

00:07:51 Florian Friedl

That so for these kind of sensors, we are talking mainly about LIDAR applications in the car and for LIDAR, it’s very important to have a certain visible range, let’s say, so a lighter system in general works.

00:08:06 Florian Friedl

And the way that you sent out laser?

00:08:08

Right.

00:08:09 Florian Friedl

A pulsed laser light, usually that is reflected from your obstacle car or pedestrian or something like this, and then you detect the signal that is coming back as a reflection with your sensor.

00:08:21 Florian Friedl

As you can imagine, if there is a pedestrian wearing a black hoodie, for example, not much light is coming back.

00:08:28 Florian Friedl

So you really need to be able to see.

00:08:30 Florian Friedl

These very, very small signals, even to see them and then to detect and also see the object that is there.

00:08:37 Will Mountford

And to get in the kind of the micro scale, the engineering of how those chips work and imagine the speed of processing means a lot there.

00:08:46 Will Mountford

So could we walk through?

00:08:49 Will Mountford

The steps of how a LIDAR scanner works, what is step one, send signal, Step 2 reflection off signal, step three processing and then.

00:08:58 Florian Friedl

So yeah, step one is sending the signal, so by pulsing your laser light.

00:09:03 Florian Friedl

Step 2 is the reflection of the signal.

00:09:06 Florian Friedl

Basically, the signal coming back from the object you want to see you want to.

00:09:10 Florian Friedl

Step Three is seeing the signal that is coming back.

00:09:16 Florian Friedl

And step four is then calculating the distance and interpreting the signal that is coming back.

00:09:22 Florian Friedl

So from Hamamatsu side we usually focus on the first three steps, we don’t deal with the signal processing afterwards, only to a certain extent, but we are the experts for the photo.

00:09:34 Florian Friedl

So we deal with everything that you can do with the light and with a little bit of readout signal processing, that means very simply with the information we get from the laser and from the sensor, we can for example directly calculate the distance to the object.

00:09:48 Florian Friedl

But we don’t do any interpretation of the object.

00:09:51 Florian Friedl

What kind of object is it?

00:09:53 Florian Friedl

How does it look like?

00:09:54 Florian Friedl

What is the geometry and stuff like that?

00:09:56 Will Mountford

I’ll come back to those acronyms of SPAD and MPC.

00:10:00 Will Mountford

That’s single photon and multi photon pixel counters.

00:10:05 Will Mountford

How do those compare?

00:10:07 Will Mountford

What is the difference for their application where you would use one compared to the other and what kind of information do you get back from them?

00:10:14 Florian Friedl

That’s a very good question.

00:10:16 Florian Friedl

That is a bit complicated because both technologies are actually very similar from technology point.

00:10:23 Florian Friedl

But in the end and how you use them, they are still quite different.

00:10:29 Florian Friedl

So when we talk about NPCS or Silicon PMS multi pixel photon counters or silicon PMS, it’s basically spat array, but you have multiple single Spads that are combined to one sensor cell.

00:10:45 Florian Friedl

So when I rephrase that, it’s basically you have multiple pixels for each output channel and this pat each output channel is also one pixel in the sense.

00:10:57 Will Mountford

OK, so it can collate all of that information into one point.

00:11:01 Florian Friedl

Into one point exactly.

00:11:02 Florian Friedl

But that also means that the readout and the interpretation of the pixels of the signal is quite different, because for spats you always only get information of light or no light, zero or one.

00:11:14 Florian Friedl

So you have to look at the histogram of your readout.

00:11:17 Florian Friedl

To find your real object between all the noise and ambient light, and so on.

00:11:23 Florian Friedl

For MPCS, you get a certain signal height depending on the amount of light that comes back.

00:11:29 Florian Friedl

So in this case it’s much closer from the readout to regular sensors like photodiodes or avalanche photodiodes, because in this case you can really look at the signal height and the higher the signal, the more light you get back.

00:11:45 Will Mountford

They mentioned the noise as something to filter out there, and reading through some of the material available from Hamamatsu.

00:11:52 Will Mountford

There’s also discussion of ghost objects and cross talk, the idea that looking at that histogram, the bar chart that will tell you if no yes or no, if you reach that threshold for light detection or rejecting as noise.

00:12:05 Will Mountford

How complicated is it to get an accurate answer and what can be done to ensure that you are getting the right information?

00:12:12 Will Mountford

At the right time.

00:12:13 Florian Friedl

It’s not that easy.

00:12:14 Florian Friedl

That is true, unfortunately, because we have such a high amplification built in these kind of sensors.

00:12:22 Florian Friedl

And you cannot avoid the ambient light.

00:12:24 Florian Friedl

You will always have some background light either coming from the sun or coming from city lights, or different cars or so.

00:12:32 Florian Friedl

You really have to focus on the light that you are sending out on the wavelength of the light that you’re sending out, and to try to just collect this signal.

00:12:42 Florian Friedl

This light from the signal.

00:12:44 Florian Friedl

And by using a bandpass filter for example, you can remove a lot of the different wavelengths that are not used by your laser in addition to the ambient light, you always have.

00:12:54 Florian Friedl

Of course, some thermal noise in the signal that cannot be avoided.

00:12:59 Florian Friedl

And you will always see this in the sensor.

00:13:01 Florian Friedl

So you always have to find the right threshold to distinguish this noise combined with the last remaining ambient light from your real signal.

00:13:11 Florian Friedl

That is actually one of the most complicated topics here.

00:13:14 Florian Friedl

Yeah, the crosstalk is basically the effect that.

00:13:19 Florian Friedl

The signal on one pixel has on the Pixel next to it.

00:13:23 Florian Friedl

Between each pixel and each readout line, you have certain inductance.

00:13:29 Florian Friedl

So that means you have a magnetic field that is introduced when.

00:13:32 Florian Friedl

You have a.

00:13:33 Florian Friedl

Large signal on one pixel and this magnetic field might influence the pixel or the signal output of the pixel next to it.

00:13:41 Florian Friedl

So it might be that you see signals on both of these pixels, even though you only have a real signal on one of these, and from the experience with our APD arrays, we notice that this is very critical, especially for LIDAR applications, because it might introduce we call it ghost signals.

00:14:00 Florian Friedl

So you see.

00:14:01 Florian Friedl

Stuff that is not really there just because of the.

00:14:04 Florian Friedl

Just talk.

00:14:05 Florian Friedl

So it needs to be avoided.

00:14:07 Will Mountford

A spread of false negatives around where the false positives is exactly, exactly.

00:14:16 Will Mountford

That’s one other part that could have leaked out to me.

00:14:18 Will Mountford

That was the use of micro lenses in filtering the light coming in and the someone going out, how micro a lens are we talking about?

00:14:27 Florian Friedl

So this is actually one of the newer technologies that we just used since last year.

00:14:34 Florian Friedl

And that we implement now on all of our MPC and SPC arrays.

00:14:39 Florian Friedl

Basically, we use these microlenses in a way that the size of the lens is the same as the size of 1 pixel in our 2D sensor array.

00:14:49 Florian Friedl

That means one of the lenses is depends on the pixel size, but between 10 micrometer and 25 micrometer in this range.

00:14:57 Will Mountford

With the use of those micro lenses on the MPC and Spads, what kind of advantages does that offer compared to using just as they?

00:15:06 Florian Friedl

Were so in the regular sensor.

00:15:09 Florian Friedl

Array without microlenses, you will always have basically a small gap in between each of the sensing areas of the active areas.

00:15:19 Florian Friedl

Of each pixel and with the microlens array you can almost 100% eliminate these blind spots between the pixels, let’s say, because all the light that even falls into these in between areas is focused on the active area. By using these microlenses.

00:15:37 Will Mountford

It’s like a big advantage in.

00:15:38 Will Mountford

Terms of.

00:15:39 Will Mountford

The clarity of information that.

00:15:40 Will Mountford

Coming in.

00:15:41 Florian Friedl

Of the clarity of information and the PDE, the photon detection efficiency is also increased in the end.

00:15:48 Will Mountford

OK.

00:15:48 Will Mountford

And now to talk about the new series of technology coming out of Hamamatsu in this year, maybe the next couple of years as well, you know, to put some numbers to it in terms of percentages and resolution and available light processing.

00:16:01 Will Mountford

How much quicker, faster, clearer are things getting?

00:16:04 Florian Friedl

That is not easy to answer because we are focusing very much on custom specific sensors, especially for automotive, because from our point of view, every tier one, every OEM has slightly different requirements on their and perfect system.

00:16:21 Florian Friedl

So to say, and that is true for the sensor side, but also on the readout on the ASIC side.

00:16:26 Florian Friedl

So we are really focusing on building custom specific sensors for each individual requirements here.

00:16:32 Florian Friedl

So it’s tough to say details, but when speaking very general, we are working on improving the photon detection efficiency even further because one of the problems is that we are using near infrared light usually for most of these light our sensors.

00:16:47 Florian Friedl

That is just beyond the human eye visibility.

00:16:51 Florian Friedl

So we are a little bit higher from wavelengths perspective compared to that what the human eye can see.

00:16:58 Florian Friedl

Unfortunately, the silicon material that is used for almost all of these sensors is getting transparent at these infrared light already, so it’s really tough to catch enough light to see the signal, and that is what we are working on improving right now. We have photo detection efficiency 20% roughly.

00:17:19 Florian Friedl

And our sensors and within the next year, we are targeting to 25, maybe even 30% combining a couple of different.

00:17:27 Will Mountford

Yes, that would be a 25 to 50% increase very roughly. Yes, exactly. And in terms of putting all of that into application, there was another acronym that we’ve encountered now of ASACS.

00:17:39 Will Mountford

Are those part of that percentage boost that you’ve?

00:17:43 Florian Friedl

So the basics are basically the readout circuit that is right behind the sensor.

00:17:49 Florian Friedl

So just to manage all the readout from the optical sensor and also very rough signal processing like action counting or some thresholding.

00:18:00 Florian Friedl

To see if the signal is above a threshold.

00:18:02 Florian Friedl

If it’s below, then we don’t even take it into.

00:18:05 Florian Friedl

Maybe a small buffer to record a couple of milliseconds or so from your signal.

00:18:10 Florian Friedl

Very simple stuff, but it’s important to combine it as close as possible to the sensor to not get any parasitic effects like for example crosstalk.

00:18:20 Florian Friedl

That’s why we combine it with our sensor directly.

00:18:22 Will Mountford

And all of this is being done, as you say in.

00:18:25 Will Mountford

Custom scenarios for custom.

00:18:27 Florian Friedl

Applications exactly.

00:18:29 Florian Friedl

So we have basically a couple of different options here and like a library of different ASIC functions that can be implemented for each individual customer design.

00:18:39 Will Mountford

And then one of the new generation features will be multi echo detection, which is a very fun phrase to say.

00:18:46 Will Mountford

But what does that actually entail in terms of managing all of that signal?

00:18:50 Florian Friedl

Yeah, it’s a bit clunky.

00:18:51 Florian Friedl

Multi echo detection.

00:18:53 Florian Friedl

Basically it means that when I send out one laser pulse, it might be that the laser pulse is not only reflected on one surface but on several surfaces and that I get back not one signal but multiple signals.

00:19:07 Florian Friedl

For example, when we have bad weather, we have snow or rain, then it might be that a part of this signal is already reflected on some of the rain drops and then I might get a small signal back from the weather effects and another from my car.

00:19:22 Florian Friedl

And when talking about a car that I want to detect that doesn’t have one flat surface, but it’s also like stepped for example.

00:19:29 Florian Friedl

So it might be that a couple of different signals with different ranges comes back from one object.

00:19:35 Florian Friedl

And with this multi echo detection I can detect a couple of these echos that come back from only one laser signal and I know that they belong to this one laser signal.

00:19:44 Will Mountford

That helps to manage all of that scattered information.

00:19:47 Florian Friedl

That scatter exactly.

00:19:48 Florian Friedl

And also if I have multiple objects that I want to see like a pedestrian and a car in one laser shot, I can also distinguish between multiple objects in my way.

00:19:58 Will Mountford

Sounds like something that would be very important because any misinformation could have critical consequences.

00:20:04 Florian Friedl

Exactly. Exactly. Yes.

00:20:06 Will Mountford

Well, looking to the future, then what do you say the near future holds for Hamamatsu technologies looking over maybe the next five years?

00:20:14 Will Mountford

You know, where do you see all of this going that you know is coming up and then beyond the kind of future that we may?

00:20:19 Will Mountford

Not even be prepared for.

00:20:21 Florian Friedl

We are right now working or in the final steps of the Beck eliminated MPCS.

00:20:27 Florian Friedl

The samples are in production, right?

00:20:29 Florian Friedl

The back illumination of the NPCS is basically there to further increase the photon detection efficiency.

00:20:35 Florian Friedl

Again, we did one step this year with the microlens arrays on top of the sensor.

00:20:40 Florian Friedl

The next step for the next improvement will be the structure chains from front illuminated NPCS to back illuminated NPCS, and with the step to the back illuminated NPCS we are.

00:20:51 Florian Friedl

Also providing a couple of standard arrays with a certain resolution pixel resolution.

00:20:59 Florian Friedl

That will also be available from the beginning of next year.

00:21:02 Florian Friedl

The resolution in this case is still not too high, but as I mentioned, these are standard products and we are rather focusing on custom arrays.

00:21:11 Florian Friedl

So we are already talking with several customers here in Europe and China and in the US.

00:21:16 Florian Friedl

And with these kind of customers, we were also talking about larger resolution array.

00:21:21 Will Mountford

And is there anything that you see that would be maybe a limit to?

00:21:24 Will Mountford

The growth or the development that could go into the arrays you know to see if there’s a threshold that is going to stop the development of new products either in terms of you know signal processing speed or photosensitivity or you know material availability.

00:21:39 Will Mountford

Is there anything that would stop you from getting?

00:21:41 Will Mountford

For that fun.

00:21:43 Florian Friedl

With the technology that we have right now, it seems like the fault detection efficiency will be at a limit at around 30 to 35%.

00:21:54 Florian Friedl

Something like this if we want to go beyond this, we either need to use different materials, or maybe even different technologies as of today.

00:22:03 Florian Friedl

The second limit is with the resolution of these sensor arrays and the limit is not perceive the resolution of the sensor.

00:22:13 Florian Friedl

Operate, but the readout signal that you need for this array if it gets larger, you can imagine that the readout circuit will also get more complicated and also larger.

00:22:25 Florian Friedl

And actually in this case it might get a bit difficult with the thermal management because all this ASIC heats up quite significantly and optical sensors in general do not like to be heated up.

00:22:40 Florian Friedl

So we need to see or find a way to keep the thermal heat here as low as possible.

00:22:46 Florian Friedl

Without affecting the sensor array.

00:22:53 Will Mountford

And lastly, who between the Hamamatsu labs where you are working and the end users, the people sat in cars should have learned something new from this interview and all the stuff that we’ve talked about, what kind of summary would you want to give to them?

00:23:07 Florian Friedl

So I think it’s interesting for everybody who is interested in LIDAR technology and in new optical technologies that are coming to the market right now.

00:23:18 Florian Friedl

And also, maybe car enthusiasts that wants to understand how these new functions that are pushing to the car are working, what is the background for this?

00:23:27 Florian Friedl

I think the easiest summary to give is basically there are many different LIDAR technologies on the market and also different sensor.

00:23:38 Florian Friedl

Technologies that are used.

00:23:40 Florian Friedl

So it is very important to know and understand your exact use case.

00:23:46 Florian Friedl

And with that I mean the scope of your lighter system that you’re using.

00:23:50 Florian Friedl

Are you having a long range lighter or short range lighter like a lighter cocoon for a very short range?

00:23:56 Florian Friedl

Something like this?

00:23:57 Florian Friedl

And then you need to know which kind of technology and what ASIC functions are important for your use case.

00:24:05 Florian Friedl

Every lighter is different.

00:24:07 Florian Friedl

Every lighter has different advantages, disadvantages and also requirements on the sensor.

00:24:13 Florian Friedl

So yeah, you need to understand what is important for you and what are the functions that are best suited for you.

00:24:19 Florian Friedl

And we from Hamamatsu, we are focusing on helping you with these choices basically and also with combining the.

00:24:26 Florian Friedl

Sensor array with the necessary ASIC functions.

00:24:31 Will Mountford

And if people want to know more about Hamamatsu and all of the work that is coming from your labs, anything that you guys are up to at all, where can they find that information?

00:24:40 Florian Friedl

They can find it on our webpage, hamamatsu.com or .de

00:24:43 Will Mountford

Florian, thank you so much for your time.

00:24:45 Will Mountford

And talking with us today.

00:24:47 Florian Friedl

Thank you very much.

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