Phone makers like Apple have increased the number of lens elements over time, and while some, such as Samsung, are now folding the lens to create “periscope” lenses for greater zoom capabilities, companies have generally locked with the element stacked objective system.
“Optics has become more sophisticated, you have added more lens elements, you have created strong aspherical elements to achieve the necessary reduction in space, 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 elements of plastic and glass lenses stacked over an image sensor, the Metalenz design uses a single lens built on a glass plate that has a size between 1×1 and 3×3 millimeters. Take a close look at the microscope and you will see nanostructures that measure a thousandth of 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 doctorate at Harvard University with acclaimed physicist and co-founder Metalenz Federico Capasso. The company was removed from the research group in 2017.
Light passes through these modeled nanostructures, which look like millions of circles of different diameters at the microscopic level. “To the extent that a curved lens accelerates and slows down light to bend it, each of them allows us to do the same thing so that we can bend and shape light just by changing the diameters of these circles,” says Devlin.
The resulting image quality is as clear as the one you get from a multi-lens system, and the nanostructures do the job of reducing or eliminating many of the degrading image aberrations common to traditional cameras. And design doesn’t just preserve space. Devlin says a Metalenz camera can provide more light back to the image sensor, allowing brighter and clearer images than you would get with traditional lens elements.
Another benefit? The company has formed partnerships with two semiconductor leaders (which can currently produce one million Metalenz “chips” per day), which means that optics is made in the same foundries that manufacture consumer and industrial devices – an important step in simplifying the chain. for Supply.
New forms of detection
Metalenz will enter mass production towards the end of the year. Its first application will serve as a lens system for a 3D sensor in a smartphone. (The company did not name the phone manufacturer.)