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6 Chapter One: Solving Key Design Challenges As with other areas of engineering design, designing LiDAR systems requires balancing trade-offs among speed, precision, size, safety, and power. This chapter explores these challenges and ways in which Maxim's receiver-end hardware can help solve them. Chapter One: Solving Key Design Challenges "The receiver-end hardware is the core component of a LiDAR system. The key performance metrics-that is, the maximum detectable distance, distance measurement accuracy and precision, and capability to distinguish signal from noise-are highly dependent on the receiver-end hardware." Kai Zhou ADAS Sensor Engineer, Ansys "Autonomous driving is the final technology people want in cars. LiDAR is how we will get there." Binay Kumar Bajaj Director of Business Management at Maxim Integrated Design Challenge #1: Increasing Speed Today's cutting-edge applications require that the entire process, from transmission to processing, occurs in real time. Imagine a self-driving car traveling at 55 mph that needs to detect, process, and respond to the environment instantaneously. Increase the speed to 65 mph, and the LiDAR speed and resolution requirements increase as well. LiDAR systems must have sufficient bandwidth to capture and process all environmental details, so it is logical that increasing bandwidth would be a good solution for capturing and processing more pixels. Expanding LiDAR system bandwidth is easier said than done, however, because doing so increases signal noise, which can distort the signal and lead to misinterpretations over long distances. Achieving the highest signal-to-noise ratio requires high feedback resistance, which increases the open voltage swing and can in turn create the need for a high-gain-