Fully qualified and released for volume production using SkyWater’s Technology as a Service (TaaS) model, Lumotive’s product represents the first ever programmable optical metasurface that has been commercialised into a mass-producible chip.
Optical beamforming is used in a range of applications, from laser communications and LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) to imaging and remote sensing. Lumotive’s Light Control Metasurface (LCM) technology can manipulate light at the subwavelength level using nanostructures fabricated onto the surface of a silicon chip.
Beams of light can be shaped, split and steered electronically with digital precision and repeatability, marking a dramatic transformation over traditional mechanical methods, and enables significant system-level advantages in compactness, durability, speed, precision, power consumption, reliability, design flexibility and scalability for the next generation of industrial sensors, robotics, autonomous vehicles and other applications that rely on accurate 3D sensing.
Lumotive and SkyWater have, over the past two years, collaborated on the development and release of a custom photonics process to create LM10, Lumotive’s first LCM product offering.
This new process has been qualified in SkyWater’s production environment and establishes the first commercially available chip-scale beam steering solution for solid-state LIDAR. LM10 is already shipping worldwide as the beam steering solution inside lead customers’ qualified 3D sensors.
The arrival of programmable LCM-powered beam steering with dynamic scanning and software-definable capabilities will enable solid-state LIDAR to be used for precise and adaptable interaction with the physical world in real time.
According to Lumotive Founder and CTO Dr. Gleb Akselrod, “The capability to shape and steer light with a single chip is already revolutionising applications such as 3D sensing, with many more on the horizon.”
Dr. Akselrod continued: “Achieving our full LM10 LCM chip qualification in SkyWater’s production process marks a watershed moment in the field of optical metamaterials. The ability to produce compact, adaptive programmable optics using well-established and scalable silicon fabrication techniques will forever change a wide range of industries, from 3D sensing to optical communications to AR/VR displays. We are proud to have made this a reality together with SkyWater.”
