Skywater, the US mil spec foundry, and optical chip specialist , Lumotive,  have collaborated on the production implementation of Lumotive’s solid-state optical beamforming technology in SkyWater’s fab.

Fully qualified and released for volume production utilising SkyWater’s Technology as a Service (TaaS) model, Lumotive’s product represents the first ever programmable optical metasurface that has been commercialized into a mass-producible chip.

Optical beamforming is used in a range of IMG_3002-150x150.pngapplications, from laser communications and LiDAR  to imaging and remote sensing. Lumotive’s Light Control Metasurface (LCM) technology manipulates 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.

 

“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,” says Lumotive founder and CEO Gleb Axelrod.

This marks a 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  developed a custom photonics process to create LM10, Lumotive’s first LCM product offering.

This new process has been qualified in SkyWater’s fab and establishes a commercially available chip-scale beam steering process 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 enables solid-state LIDAR to become the new standard for precise and adaptable interaction with the physical world in real time.