Phone makers like Apple have increased the number of lens elements over time, and while some, like Samsung, are now folding optics to create “periscope” lenses for more zoom capabilities, companies are generally ‘have been left with the proven stacked lens element and true system.
“The optics became more sophisticated, you added more elements of the lens, you created strong aspherical elements to achieve the necessary reduction of space, but there has been no revolution in the last ten years in this field,” says Schindelbeck.
This is where Metalenz comes in. Instead of using elements of plastic and glass lenses stacked on an image sensor, Metalenz’s design uses a single lens built on a glass wafer that is between 1×1 and 3×3 millimeters. Look very closely at the microscope and you will see nanostructures that measure one-thousandth the width of a human hair. These nanostructures bend the light rays so that many of the shortcomings of single-lens camera systems are corrected.
Basic technology was formed through a decade of research when co-founder and CEO Robert Devlin was working on his doctorate at Harvard University with the acclaimed physicist and co-founder of Metalenz Federico Capasso. The company left the research group in 2017.
Light passes through these patterned nanostructures, which look like millions of circles with different diameters at the microscopic level. “Much in the way a slow curve accelerates and slows down light to bend it, each of these allows us to do the same, so we can bend and shape light just by changing the diameters of these circles, ”Devlin says. .
The resulting image quality is as sharp as you would get from a multi-lens system, and nanostructures do the job of reducing or eliminating many of the degrading image aberrations common to traditional cameras. And the design doesn’t just conserve space. Devlin says a Metalenz camera can return more light to the image sensor, allowing for clearer, sharper images than you would get with traditional lenses.
Another benefit? The company has established partnerships with two semiconductor leaders (who can currently produce one million Metalenz “chips” a day), that is, the optics are made in the same foundries that manufacture industrial and consumer devices, a important step to simplify the supply chain.
New forms of detection
Metalenz will go into mass production later this year. Its first application will be to serve as a target system for a 3D sensor on a smartphone. (The company did not name the phone manufacturer).