Phone manufacturers like Apple have increased the number of lens elements over time, and although some, such as Samsung, are now folding optics to create ‘periscope’ lenses for greater zoom features, companies have generally stuck to the proven stacked lens element. system.
“The optics have become more sophisticated, you have added more lens elements, you have created strong aspherical elements to bring about the necessary reduction in space, but there has been no revolution in the last ten years in this area,” says Schindelbeck.
This is where Metalenz comes in. Instead of using plastic and glass lens elements over an image sensor, Metalenz uses a single lens built on a glass plate that is between 1×1 and 3×3 millimeters in size. Look very closely under a microscope and you will see nanostructures that are 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 worked at Harvard University with the popular physicist and Federal Capasso, co-founder of Metalenz. The company was spun out of the research group in 2017.
Light passes through these patterned nanostructures, resembling millions of circles of different diameters at the microscopic level. “Just as a curved lens accelerates and decelerates the light to bend it, each of them can do the same, so we can bend and shape the light by simply changing the diameters of these circles,” says Devlin. .
The resulting image quality is just as sharp as you would get from a multilens system, and the nanostructures do the job of reducing or eliminating many of the image-degrading aberrations that traditional cameras use. And the design not only saves space. Devlin says that a Metalenz camera can deliver more light to the image sensor, enabling brighter and sharper images than you would get with traditional lens elements.
Another benefit? The company has formed partnerships with two semiconductor conductors (which can currently supply one million Metalenz ‘chips’ per day), which means that the optics are manufactured in the same foundries that manufacture consumer and industrial devices – an important step in the supply chain simplify.
New forms of intuition
Metalenz will start mass production by the end of the year. Its first application is to serve as the lens system of a 3D sensor in a smartphone. (The company did not give the name of the telephone manufacturer.)