Phone makers like Apple have increased the number of lens elements over time, and while some, like Samsung, are now folding optics to make ‘periscope’ lenses for greater zoom capabilities, companies have generally stuck to the tried-and-true stacked lens element system.
“The optics got more advanced, you added more lens elements, you created strong aspherical elements to achieve the necessary space savings, but there has been no revolution in this field in the last 10 years,” says Schindelbeck.
This is where Metaalz comes in. Rather than using plastic and glass lens elements stacked over an image sensor, Metaalz uses a single lens in its design built on a glass wafer that is between 1×1 and 3×3 millimeters in size. Look very closely under a microscope and you will see nanostructures measuring one-thousandth the width of a human hair. Those nanostructures bend light rays in a way that corrects many of the shortcomings of single-lens camera systems.
The core technology was shaped by a decade of research when co-founder and CEO Robert Devlin worked on his PhD at Harvard University with acclaimed physicist and Metaalz co-founder Federico Capasso. The company emerged from the research group in 2017.
Light passes through these patterned nanostructures that look like millions of circles of different diameters at the microscopic level. “Just as a curved lens speeds up and slows down light to bend it, we can all do the same thing, so we can bend and shape light by changing the diameters of these circles,” says Devlin.
The resulting image quality is as sharp as what you’d get from a multi-lens system, and the nanostructures reduce or eliminate many of the image-degrading aberrations common with traditional cameras. And the design not only saves space. Devlin says a Metaalz camera can send more light back to the image sensor, allowing for brighter and sharper images than with traditional lens elements.
Another advantage? The company has partnered with two semiconductor leaders (who can currently produce one million Metalenz “chips” per day), meaning the optics are made in the same foundries that manufacture consumer and industrial devices – an important step in simplifying the process. of the supply chain.
New forms of perception
Metaalz will go into mass production by the end of the year. The first application will be to serve as the lens system of a 3D sensor in a smartphone. (The company has not provided the name of the phone manufacturer.)