Phone makers like Apple have increased the number of lens elements over time, and while some, like Samsung, are now doubling the optics to create “periscope” lenses for greater zoom capabilities, companies have generally kept to themselves the stacked lens element proven system.
“Optics just got more sophisticated, you added more lens elements, you created strong aspherical elements to achieve the necessary space reduction, but there has been no revolution in the last 10 years in this field,” says Schindelbeck.
This is where Metalenz comes in. Instead of using plastic and glass lens elements stacked on top of an image sensor, Metalenz’s design uses a single lens built on a glass wafer size from 1×1 to 3×3 mm. Look closely at the microscope and you will see nanostructures measuring a thousandth the width of a human hair. These nanostructures bend light rays in a way that corrects many of the shortcomings of single-lens camera systems.
The core technology was formed through a decade of research when co-founder and CEO Robert Devlin was working on his PhD at Harvard University with acclaimed Metalenz physicist and co-founder Federico Capasso. The company was spun off from the research group in 2017.
The light passes through these standardized nanostructures, which look like millions of circles with different diameters at the microscopic level. “In the same way that a curved lens speeds up and slows down the light to bend it, each one allows us to do the same thing, so we can bend and shape the light just by changing the diameters of these circles,” says Devlin.
The resulting image quality is as clear as you would get from a multi-level 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 save space. Devlin says that a Metalenz camera can provide more light back to the image sensor, allowing for brighter and sharper images than you would get with traditional lens elements.
Another benefit? The company has formed partnerships with two semiconductor leaders (who can currently produce one million Metalenz “chips” per day), which means that optics are made in the same foundries that manufacture consumer and industrial devices – an important step in simplifying the supply chain.
New ways of detection
Metalenz will enter mass production at the end of the year. Your first application will be to serve as a 3D sensor lens system on a smartphone. (The company did not provide the phone manufacturer’s name.)