A 4 to 40V Wide Input Range and Energy Re-Cycling High Power LiDAR Driver for 5% Efficiency Enhancement and 300m Long-distance Object Detection

In automotive applications, the battery voltage may drop to a low voltage of 4V when a sudden power-on occurs, and immediately rise to a high voltage of 40V during a loading pump. Thus, the paper presents a 4 to 40V wide input range high power LiDAR driver based on an enhancement Gallium Nitride (eGaN) switch. In addition, in the case of high di/dt, the proposed protection re-cycling (PRC) technique is used to re-direct the charge at the gate of the eGaN switch to a storage capacitor, which not only protects the GaN switch but also improves the efficiency by 5%. Experimental results show that the resultant long-distance object detection can be up to 300 meters.