Daylight Is No Barrier for STMicro's New FlightSense VL53L8CX Multi-Zone Time-of-Flight Sensor

STMicroelectronics has unveiled a new multi-zone time-of-flight (ToF) distance sensor, the VL53L8CX, which it claims offers improvements over its predecessors in brightly-lit environments and power efficiency.

STMicro launched its first multi-zone ToF sensor, which detects the distance between the sensor and one or more objects by firing out laser light and timing how long it takes for the light to bounce back, in 2021. Its latest model, the FlightSense VL53L8CX, comes with a range of improvements over its predecessors — including a dramatically boosted range under daylight conditions, which has previously restricted performance by washing out the laser light and blinding the sensor.

The new model, STMicro says, can deliver a 285cm (around 112") range in full daylight — up from 170cm (around 67") for the last-generation VL53L5CX. While still down from the sensor's 400cm (around 157") maximum range in ideal lighting conditions, it's a big boost — and one the company has achieved without increasing the sensor's power draw, which is down from 4.5mW in the last-generation model to 1.6mW for its lowest operational power mode.

The sensor delivers an 8×8 sensing grid, offering 64 locations, across a 45×45° field of view and with a 60Hz frame rate, the company says. Its sensitivity and precision is enough, STMicro says, to be used at the heart of a gesture-based human-machine interaction system, and can be combined with the company's STM32 AI models for hand posture recognition.

The device is also claimed to offer high accuracy for the measurement of container contents, including for liquid-level monitoring, for autonomous robotics, camera autofocus systems, and includes SPI connectivity as well as the I2C available on previous models.

The VL53L8CX is now available to order through STMicro's site, with pricing starting $8.91 in single-unit quantities and dropping to $3.60 per unit for 1,000-unit trays.