Two companies caught my eye at CES with their metalens offerings: MetaOptics and Kyocera. MetaOptics is a Singapore-based company that uses a laser writing techniques and deep UV lithography to define and fabricate circular pillar structures as small as 80 nms. They are fabricated on glass and the company says the processing and materials are all compatible with silicon foundries, so older fabs could potentially be converted to enable high-volume manufacture of their flat lenses. At CES, the company showed a 12” glass wafer that contained a number of their rectangular flat lens structures.

MetaOptics has designed and fabricated optimized structures for red, green and blue wavelengths and demonstrated them in several product prototypes. For example, individual RGB flat lenses were used to collimate RGB laser light in a pico-projector demo allowing the size of the device to be much smaller than one using conventional optics.

A second demo assembled the RGB structures in a triad configuration to capture and focus light on a 2MP CMOS sensor. This is a camera with a flat lens. This flat-lens/sensor package was then integrated into a smartphone to illustrate that phones can have cameras without a lens bump. The phone also used the same package to allow for contact-less fingerprint sensing to open the phone.

In addition, they integrated the package into a pair of Meta Ray-Ban glasses. Since this is a low-resolution sensor at this stage, it can’t replace the higher megapixel camera, but it was able to be useful for gesture recognition.

And finally, they showed how an array of flat lenses can be coupled to an array of microLEDs to enable chip-to-chip optical communications in large packages or even server-to-server optical communication.

Kyocera took a different approach. They designed their metalens with overlapping red and green-optimized structures to create a focal point that is wavelength dependent. When placing a display in back of this lens, green and red light is focused in front of the display creating an aerial or floating image, but the red and green light are at different distances from the watch surface. This creates a two-plane floating image giving some sense of depth – green images appear farther from the viewer, while red images appear closer. Their metalens is only 1mm thick.