ST and Metalenz collaborate on groundbreaking consumer, automotive and industrial optical sensors

STMicroelectronics and Metalenz Collaborate on Groundbreaking Optical Sensors for Consumer, Automotive, and Industrial Applications

• Technical cooperation agreement includes manufacturing process development, industrialization of metasurface optics technology and technology licensing

• Groundbreaking flat lens technology brings performance, power, size and cost advantages to complex optical systems

China, June 16, 2021 – STMicroelectronics (ST), a global semiconductor leader serving multiple electronic applications, and Metaenz, a pioneer in the design and commercialization of metasurface technology, jointly announced a technology co-development and licensing agreement. ST will develop manufacturing processes for Metalenz's meta-optical technology to produce next-generation optical sensors for smartphones, consumer electronics, medical and automotive applications. Metalenz was spun off from the research group of Professor Federico Capasso at Harvard University, the inventor of the technology. This breakthrough technology is expected to be ready for mass production by the end of the year.

Metalenz's versatile metasurface optics enable new optical sensors for next-generation consumer electronics such as smartphones, as well as medical devices and automotive systems. For example, cameras based on this new flat lens technology can collect more light, increase image brightness, and produce images of comparable or better quality than traditional refractive lenses, while using less power and being smaller.

STMicroelectronics will integrate Metalenz's metasurface optical technology into its existing diffractive optical element manufacturing process at its 300mm wafer fab in Crolles, France, leveraging its leading position in the fast-growing near-infrared (NIR) optical sensor market. Today, STMicroelectronics is the market leader in ToF proximity detection and ranging sensors, with more than 1 billion units shipped.

“Versatile optical technologies are a game-changer for next-generation optical sensors used in consumer electronics such as smartphones, as well as in medical and automotive applications, thanks to their power, efficiency and performance advantages,” said Eric Aussedat, Executive Vice President and General Manager of STMicroelectronics’ Imaging Business Unit. “This partnership will help ST continue to deliver innovative, advanced optical sensing solutions to its customers by combining Metalenz’s advanced technology with our proprietary technology to process chips on state-of-the-art 300mm manufacturing equipment at our Crolles facility.”

Dr. Rob Devlin, CEO and co-founder of Metalenz, said: "We are excited to collaborate with an industry leader like ST. The optical technology developed by Metalenz complements ST's advanced manufacturing capabilities and market position. Our fabless business model allows us to focus on innovation and designing groundbreaking optical technologies that will revolutionize optical sensors for smartphones and automotive applications. The collaboration with ST allows us to expand our product range while taking full advantage of ST's large-scale production capacity to apply Metalenz technology within ST products, bringing ST's product differentiation to a new level."

Editor's Reference

Today's cell phone technology is evolving at a rapid pace to squeeze more and better features into a small body. However, lenses have remained essentially unchanged since the Middle Ages. Now, that's changing, as metasurface optics introduces a new class of lenses that work very differently from traditional lenses. Instead of bulky spherical lenses, metasurface optics integrates multiple complex optical functions on a single flat layer, which can reduce the size of each lens while also reducing the number of lenses required for a lens, greatly reducing lens size, component count, assembly complexity, and overall cost.

The metasurface optical technology developed by Metalenz complements STMicroelectronics' advanced manufacturing capabilities and their advantages complement each other. STMicroelectronics integrates semiconductor manufacturing processes and optical technologies, and uses advanced photolithography masks in semiconductor wafer fabs to build a modulated diffraction wavefront layer on the metasurface. Like silicon-based chips, metasurface flat lenses are also processed in a clean room using the same semiconductor manufacturing technology as chips. The nanostructures of these flat lenses are equivalent to one thousandth of the diameter of a human hair, and can refract light in an appropriate way, achieving the same function as a complex multi-lens refractive lens system on a single layer.

The technology is initially targeted at the fast-growing NIR near-infrared market. NIR wavelengths are used for all 3D sensors, such as facial recognition, camera autofocus, micro-lidar, and AR/VR depth maps, which have become standard features in today's smartphones. Given these benefits, optical lenses made in semiconductor fabs may one day be as widely used as traditional refractive lenses.

About STMicroelectronics

STMicroelectronics has 46,000 creators and innovators of semiconductor technology, and controls the semiconductor supply chain and the most advanced manufacturing equipment. As an independent semiconductor equipment manufacturer, STMicroelectronics develops products and solutions with more than 100,000 customers and thousands of partners, and jointly builds an ecosystem to help them better cope with various challenges and new opportunities and meet the world's higher demand for sustainable development. STMicroelectronics' technology makes people's travel smarter, power and energy management more efficient, and the Internet of Things and 5G technology are more widely used.

About Metalenz

Founded in 2016, Metalenz is the first commercial meta-optics company. Its metasurface technology provides complex multifunctional optical performance on a semiconductor layer and is able to move the mass production of optical devices to semiconductor manufacturing plants, manufacturing optical lenses like computer chips. As a fabless semiconductor company, Metalenz is committed to the design and innovative application of meta-optics, revolutionizing sensing technology for consumer electronics, medical and automotive applications. The company has the exclusive global license to the basic intellectual property portfolio related to metasurfaces developed by Harvard University's Capasso Laboratory, and has more than 20 patents for technical innovations that can simplify and improve optical devices and cover multiple markets.