New Meta-Optic Lens Tech Enters Commercial Development
Instead, Metalenz technology is a “single lens built on a glass wafer that is between 1×1 to 3×3 millimeter in size” with nanostructures that “bend light rays in a way that corrects for many of the shortcomings of single-lens camera systems.” Company co-founder and chief executive Robert Devlin spent a decade at Harvard University working on his Ph.D. on this topic with Metalenz co-founder and physicist Federico Capasso. The company spun out of their research group in 2017.
Devlin said that the nanostructures enable them to bend and shape light “much in the way that a curved lens speeds up and slows down light to bend it.” The resulting image is “just as sharp as what you’d get from a multilens system,” with the nanostructures eliminating or reducing aberrations “common to traditional cameras.”
The company just announced a $10 million investment that will enable it to scale production and speed up development of miniature optics and a new lens system targeting smartphones, consumer electronics and applications in the automotive and healthcare industries.
Metalenz has inked partnerships with “two semiconductor leaders … meaning the optics are made in the same foundries that manufacture consumer and industrial devices — an important step in simplifying the supply chain.” The company is slated to “go into mass production toward the end of the year” to provide “the lens system of a 3D sensor in an [unnamed] smartphone.”
Devlin also pointed out that Metalenz technology can be used “in everything from instruments for healthcare to augmented- and virtual-reality cameras, to the cameras in automobiles.”
See the full story here: https://www.etcentric.org/new-meta-optic-lens-tech-enters-commercial-development/