I find it odd to state that ASC's lidars work, and just cost too much until there is sufficient volume, but then turn around and say that the pulsed lidar groups with working products (that work better than flash lidar, in fact) are too expensive. Presumably the same applies to them. ASC's focal plane arrays may be ICs that scale well, but they still need lasers, electronics, housings, lenses, and more. Just like everyone else.
It also seems odd to state that Lumotive isn't novel. The fact that people have made SLM based phased array beam steering is hardly germane to the Lumotive being able to put together a robust, wide aperture, high speed, high resolution beam steering technology, let alone a complete lidar. There is simply a lot more to getting this stuff to work than just reading some paper from 2004 about SLM based steering in the lab.
Also, no lidar OEMs have a "buy" button. You're suggesting that this is because it's all a scam? I think it's because they don't need or want to sell to you. They are all out making partnerships with large vendors. I'll grant that some companies do appear to have vaporware products (most famously Quanergy's solid state product), but the reason there are many companies working at it is being there is a need and lots of commercial potential. The commercial potential in this case comes from the automotive industry, so there is basically zero incentive to sell at a consumer level. Not even velodyne, who definitely has real products, sells over the web. Even Ouster, who prides themselves at being the "available now" high performance lidar company, doesn't have a "buy" button. Perhaps if you email their sales guys and then send them $4k they will send you a unit, but it remains that the business model isn't sustained on individual sales.
Finally, the continental lidar you linked has pretty bad angular resolution (~1deg) and no stated range. The latter probably being because flash lidar is at a fundamental disadvantage to scanned lidar. Instead of all the photons going to one place, they go everywhere. This scales very badly with range, so they will be power (SNR) limited. The only way to overcome this would be to have correspondingly more sensitive detectors, which I do not believe is the case. Even if they gang together many small flash lidars that look at narrow FOVs, those lidars would probably have to be close to one pixel wide to compete on SNR while staying eye safe, in which case you end up losing the "scales on a chip" economics. This might be one reason why Ouster still spins a pixel wide array rather than strobing many.
It also seems odd to state that Lumotive isn't novel. The fact that people have made SLM based phased array beam steering is hardly germane to the Lumotive being able to put together a robust, wide aperture, high speed, high resolution beam steering technology, let alone a complete lidar. There is simply a lot more to getting this stuff to work than just reading some paper from 2004 about SLM based steering in the lab.
Also, no lidar OEMs have a "buy" button. You're suggesting that this is because it's all a scam? I think it's because they don't need or want to sell to you. They are all out making partnerships with large vendors. I'll grant that some companies do appear to have vaporware products (most famously Quanergy's solid state product), but the reason there are many companies working at it is being there is a need and lots of commercial potential. The commercial potential in this case comes from the automotive industry, so there is basically zero incentive to sell at a consumer level. Not even velodyne, who definitely has real products, sells over the web. Even Ouster, who prides themselves at being the "available now" high performance lidar company, doesn't have a "buy" button. Perhaps if you email their sales guys and then send them $4k they will send you a unit, but it remains that the business model isn't sustained on individual sales.
Finally, the continental lidar you linked has pretty bad angular resolution (~1deg) and no stated range. The latter probably being because flash lidar is at a fundamental disadvantage to scanned lidar. Instead of all the photons going to one place, they go everywhere. This scales very badly with range, so they will be power (SNR) limited. The only way to overcome this would be to have correspondingly more sensitive detectors, which I do not believe is the case. Even if they gang together many small flash lidars that look at narrow FOVs, those lidars would probably have to be close to one pixel wide to compete on SNR while staying eye safe, in which case you end up losing the "scales on a chip" economics. This might be one reason why Ouster still spins a pixel wide array rather than strobing many.