Quebec-based technology company LeddarTech is stepping away from the lidar-components business to focus on developing software to make autonomous-vehicle and advanced driver-assist systems more accurate and cheaper.
Lidar, an abbreviation for light detection and ranging, is key technology used by autonomous vehicles to map their physical proximity to the environment and vehicles around them. About half the layoffs were at the company’s Quebec City hub, with others at offices in Montreal, Ottawa, Germany and China. LeddarTech transferred about 30 employees from its lidar components unit, which designed systems on chips for lidar makers and Tier 1 and 2 suppliers, to its data-processing segment. It could not reallocate the employees who specialized in hardware, however.LeddarTech is not completely out of the lidar-components business, however.
“Instead of trying to perceive what the sensor sees and then fuse the object, we do the opposite,” Boulanger said. “We fuse the raw signals of all these sensors, and we re-create … an abstracted relative model or a digital twin.”