Eichenholz outlined some of the approaches and technical steps that Luminar has adopted in its path to meet those many requirements in autonomous-vehicle lidar. One step, he said, was the choice of a 1550-nm, InGaAs laser, which allows both eye safety and a good photon budget. Another was the use of an InGaAs linear avalanche photodiode detector rather than single-photon counting, and scanning the laser signal for field coverage rather than using a detector array. The latter two decisions, he said, substantially reduce problems of background noise and interference. “This is a huge part of our architecture.”