Metasurface optical technology has attracted much attention. It uses metasurface design methods to replace traditional optical designs or achieve new functions.
Currently, metasurface optical technology has attracted much attention. Simply put, metasurface optical technology mainly uses metasurface design methods to replace traditional optical designs or achieve some new functions that traditional optical designs cannot achieve.
An important application of metasurface optical technology to replace traditional optical design is the design of microlenses. In traditional optical designs based on refractive lenses, it is difficult to reduce the size of visible light lenses. Therefore, for some future applications that require smaller size and lighter weight (such as next-generation smartphones and AR/VR devices), new lenses with smaller size and lighter weight are increasingly attracting attention, and metasurface technology can well meet this demand. Metasurface lenses use semiconductor lithography technology to realize large-scale sub-wavelength device arrays on silicon or glass wafers, which can greatly reduce the size of the lenses and improve various parameters of the lenses (such as light transmission efficiency). For example, Federico Capasso, a leading figure in the field of metasurface research and a professor at Harvard University, proposed a large-scale metasurface lens realized by the mature DUV technology, which can achieve the functions that traditionally require the use of convex lenses on flat glass wafers, reducing the size, thickness and weight required for optical design.
In addition to thin and light lenses, metasurface lenses can also achieve functions that are difficult to achieve with traditional optical designs. For example, by controlling the polarization characteristics of incident light through metasurface design, polarization imaging can be easily realized. In addition, metasurfaces can easily achieve high-performance optical frequency selectivity characteristics, so a microspectrometer can be realized through a metasurface lens array. These characteristics that traditional lenses cannot achieve may have important applications in next-generation machine vision applications. For example, polarization imaging can help assisted driving complete high-quality road vision detection in rainy and snowy weather, and a spectrum analyzer can be used to analyze the chemical composition of product quality.
Another important innovation in metasurface optical design is the realization of semiconductor optics. In the traditional design of image sensor modules, the design of image sensor chips and optical lenses is usually realized in completely different processes and design procedures, and then the assembly process is completed. Due to the use of completely different processes, the assembly process is very costly. After using metasurface optics, both the image sensor and lens design can be realized in the semiconductor process, and the two can also use the mature semiconductor packaging technology to be conveniently packaged together with low cost and high yield. Therefore, we believe that metasurface optical design may bring revolutionary changes to the design of image sensor modules.
