GM Cruise Acquires OEwaves Spin-off Strobe Inc.

When GM Cruise acquired Strobe Inc., it wasn’t just snapping up another lidar startup, it was buying critical technology that reshaped what’s possible for affordable, accurate sensing in mobility. Strobe’s core innovation: a solid-state, frequency-modulated (FM) lidar on a chip that collapses many of the complexity, cost, and sensitivity issues common in traditional lidar designs.

Traditional time-of-flight lidar sensors send pulses and wait for echoes, which requires high-speed detectors and is more prone to interference and noise. Strobe’s system uses a laser chirp, then mixes the return light with the outgoing source, allowing simultaneous determination of both range and velocity with fewer components and simpler detection. Crucially, this is enabled by narrow-linewidth lasers locked to whispering-gallery-mode microresonators.

What this means for the field is huge: cost of lidar units drops significantly, footprint shrinks, and performance improves. GM’s goal is staggering: a 99% reduction in lidar cost for autonomous vehicles using this tech.

At OEwaves, this aligns with our mission to push laser and optical technologies toward high stability, low noise, and system simplicity. We see this example as confirmation that the future of sensing will increasingly rely on deeply integrated, photonic below-chip components, where laser purity and noise control are not optional...they’re foundational.

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