Reports from the Heart of the Machine
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The development of the AR industry has more possibilities
Recently, the core technology company of micro-nano optics, Yiguang Technology, launched a new product of diffractive optical waveguide with completely independent patented design, international leading optical performance and mass production.
With the deep accumulation in micro-nano optical design, semiconductor precision processing, efficient automated detection and other links, after tracking various AR technologies for many years, Yuguang Technology has conducted in-depth research and many development iterations of diffracted optical waveguide technology, and successfully launched AR diffractive optical waveguide products with completely independent patented design, excellent optical performance and superior mass production performance.
This is the second generation of diffractive optical waveguide products of Yiguang Technology, which aims to meet the balanced needs of customers in the market for performance and cost, and under the premise of maintaining performance leadership, it can effectively support end customers to mass-produce and launch millions of consumer AR glasses products with annual sales next year.
It covers the integration of micro-nano optical design, semiconductor precision machining and automated inspection
Self-reliance, to solve the two major pain points of the industry
Optical waveguide is an optical technology that is more widely used in the fields of optical communication and laser. In simple terms, it is that the light achieves the directional propagation of light in the material device structure of a specific design, and the principle of total reflection is applied, and the center uses a material with a large refractive index, and a material with a small refractive index around it, which can bind the light to propagate in the medium.
Optical waveguides can be broadly divided into two types: Geometric Waveguide and Diffractive Waveguide.
Among them, the geometric optical waveguide is the array optical waveguide, which mainly realizes the output of the image and the enlargement of the eye-moving frame through the stacking of array mirrors. Representing the optical company is Israel's Lumus, and there is no large-scale mass production of eyewear products on the market.
Diffractive photofunctions can also be subdivided into Surface Relief Grating made using lithography and Volumetric Holographic Grating based on holographic interference. HoloLens 2, Magic Leap One belongs to the former; Apple acquired Akonia, and Digilens is committed to the latter.
There are two major breakthrough difficulties in diffractive optical waveguide products: one is the design ability, which is reflected in product performance and patent barriers; the other is mass production performance and cost. It has been reflected in recent industrial events:
In May 2021, British optical waveguide maker WaveOptics was acquired by US social giant Snap for more than $500 million, presumably due to the acquisition of core patents and tickets to compete with tech giants such as Meta (Facebook) and Microsoft. At present, there are only a few companies in China with the core technology of diffractive optical waveguide, and the few products introduced to the market are mostly imitations of the patented microstructure design of Microsoft or WaveOptics, which has the risk of infringing international patents.
In 2021, many companies at home and abroad launched AR terminal products equipped with diffracted optical waveguides, but they were expensive or failed to announce prices, and they could not be mass-produced. The main constraint lies in the mass production and cost status of optical waveguides.
Yiguang Technology is committed to the design, manufacture and application of advanced diffractive optical components (DOE) and micro-nano optics, providing customers with complete diffractive optical solutions, widely used in 3D scanning, 3D sensing, intelligent recognition, machine vision, AR/VR, behavioral big data analysis, intelligent monitoring, on-board assistance systems and many other fields.
A few days ago, Yiguang Technology launched a new product of diffractive optical waveguide, which not only has the intellectual property rights of independent core technology, breaks through the patent blockade of foreign manufacturers WaveOptics and Microsoft, etc., and forms a more leading original technical route and patent layout; and has excellent performance in third-party testing in terms of efficiency, uniformity, imaging quality, etc., ranking among the top international levels.
Taking the diffractive optical waveguide with microLED optical machine as an example, the average light efficiency of full-screen brightness is higher than 320 nit/lm, which can achieve the requirements of use in outdoor bright environments, and the imaging uniformity is more than 95%, and the field of view of the monolithic design reaches more than 40, which exceeds comparable similar products on the market in all aspects.
More importantly, the product has mass production and cost advantages, has formed a monthly production capacity of thousands of pieces and is continuously improving, cost controllable and continuous optimization, can effectively support end customers to mass production and launch consumer AR glasses products. Under the premise of maintaining the leading performance, the optical waveguide products of Yiguang Technology avoid the use of processes that affect yield such as helical teeth and variable depth, and the performance fluctuations between the pieces are more stable, so that the mass production has been improved, the cost has been reduced, and the space for further performance improvement has been retained.
Stirring up the tide of AR innovation and welcoming the "meta-universe"
AR smart glasses are seen as a major breakthrough in wearable devices in the future, and are expected to become a must-have item for the public like smartphones.
However, after the advent of Google Glass, Google's first smart glasses in 2013, the market has been in a tepid state, and many factors such as technological maturity, price, and user experience are obstacles to its entry into public life.
In 2021, things have changed. The arrival of the first year of the "Metaverse" means that in the future, everyone can live different lives with different styles in another parallel virtual world with different personalities and different identities.
As one of the admirers of the "metaverse", Facebook CEO Zuckerberg believes that "the next generation of computing platforms must be virtual reality and augmented reality (VR/AR)." Although the "metaverse" may mature in ten years, VR/AR technology must come first!
With the progress of AR smart glasses layout of apple, Microsoft, Google, Magic Leap, Snap, Facebook and other giants, indicating that the market has entered a stage of accelerated maturity.
From a technical point of view, the near-eye display systems of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) are pixels on the display, through a series of optical imaging elements to form a distant virtual image and projected into the human eye.
The difference is that AR glasses need to see through (see-through), both to see the real external world and to see virtual information, so the imaging system can not block the line of sight. This requires the addition of an additional optical combiner or a group of optical combiners, through the form of "cascading", the virtual information and the real scene into one, complementing each other and "enhancing" each other.
Optical waveguide is a more distinctive optical component born in response to the needs of AR glasses, because of its thin and light and high penetration characteristics of external light, it is considered to be a mandatory optical solution for consumer-grade AR glasses, and it is prohibitive because of its high price and high technical threshold.
It is reported that the cost of optics and display in AR terminal equipment accounts for nearly 60%. At present, the more widely recognized optical and display solutions in the industry are "optical waveguide + MicroLED", which is expected to become the mainstream solution of consumer-grade AR products. In particular, the surface relief grating waveguide has become the industrial direction of the key layout because of its light and thin and high transmittance functional characteristics, good mass production and cost potential.
Based on the continuous improvement of diffractive optical design, process capabilities and mass production experience, the potential for performance and yield improvement of optical waveguide products is still very large, which can support the higher performance and lower cost requirements of AR terminal innovation.
It is reported that the third generation of optical waveguide products using more advanced architecture and design methods will soon be available; it will further comprehensively improve the performance indicators of diffracted optical waveguides, and the brightness and light efficiency can reach 500-1000nit/lm, laying a solid foundation for diffractive optical waveguides to be closer to practical.
For years, the tech and investment community has been looking forward to it: Where Does The Next Big Thing Come from? The 2021 meta-universe concept is hot, covering the vision of the next generation of Internet and generalized digital technology after the mobile Internet, and the expectations of the next generation of mobile intelligent terminals fall on AR devices.
5-10 years later, AR terminal devices are expected to replace smart phones, as the next generation of mobile intelligent terminals, opening a global wave of technology for 20 years or more, becoming the most important tool carrier on the road to human digital survival.
Total global shipments of AR headsets (million units)
Source: Huawei AR Insights and Application Practices White Paper, June 2021, Strategy Analytics
Competition breaks through and creates core technical barriers
The breakthrough of Light Technology in the field of optical waveguide is based on the tracking record of years of accumulation and successful product delivery in micro-nano optics and semiconductor precision machining.
Founded in 2016, in 2018, it was well known in the industry for taking the lead in mass production of diffractive optical components (DOEs) in China and introducing the supply chain of top mobile phone manufacturers, becoming recognized as an international leading diffractive optical design and manufacturing manufacturer.
Diffractive optics (DOE) is a typical representative of micro-nano optics and is also a core component of 3D sensing and imaging systems. Since Apple released the iPhone X with 3D face recognition, DOE has received widespread attention from the industry.
DOE usually uses micro-nano manufacturing process to form a two-dimensional distribution of diffraction units, each diffraction unit can have a specific morphology, refractive index, etc., can be beam splitting, beam, collimation, deviation and other manipulations, in recent years widely used in 3D cameras, lidar, augmented reality, mixed reality and other fields.
The core optical R&D team led by Tian Kehan, the founder of the company and dr. of MIT Optics, as well as the independent intellectual property rights and optical EDA design software with DfM function, are one of the core barriers for Yiguang Technology as an internationally competitive "micro-nano optics expert", and also an important guarantee for its invincible competition with international friends in the field of DOE.
It is reported that at this stage, the design of diffractive optical waveguide is still based on the "human brain" design + forward simulation, and its microstructure has obvious periodicity, which is easy to be reverse engineered and imitated. As a result, some of the products currently launched in China face the question of "whether to infringe Microsoft technology patents" or "whether to infringe WaveOptics technology patents.".
In the past, in the design of diffractive optical components, in the past, the inverse problem was mainly solved, and the optimization algorithm was designed by the "machine", which can complete a better and more complex design more efficiently than the forward simulation "manual" optimization method.
Based on the independent micro-nano optical design software, The Optical Technology has developed a design software with a complete optimization framework and advanced optimization algorithm, specifically for diffractive optical waveguides, getting rid of the low-level stage of "human brain" design and evolving to the advanced stage of "machine" design.
Due to the mathematical characteristics of the diffracted optical waveguide optimization problem and the powerful computing power of the "machine", The Optical Technology can explore a much larger design space and degrees of freedom than the traditional diffractive optical waveguides such as Microsoft or WaveOptics, and the optimization results obtained are naturally completely different from the traditional diffractive optical waveguide designs such as Hololens or WaveOptics.
Therefore, the new generation of products of Yiguang has completely got rid of the patent blockade of foreign companies, and the company has also carried out its own patent layout in advance, forming its own patent and technical barriers.
All with mass production delivery as the ultimate goal, the diffracted optical waveguide products of the light have been optimized a lot for mass production and cost, on the basis of maintaining the leading performance, the use of leading optical optimization design and powerful DfM (Design for Manufacture), avoiding the use of bevel grating, shining grating, gradient depth grating and other designs that affect mass production, the overall fundamental improvement of yield and reduce cost, while ensuring the stability of the performance between the optical waveguides. At the same time, it also provides sufficient space for further improvement of the potential performance of optical waveguides.
At present, Yiguang Technology has released a number of diffraction surface embossed light waveguide products, which can be matched with different light sources to meet the needs of customers in a variety of application scenarios:
●B series multi-piece full-color waveguide, 40 ° FoV, mainly used in industrial AR glasses, can be used with LCOS or DLP optical machine;
●C series single-piece full-color optical waveguide, 30-40 FoV, mainly used for consumer AR glasses, can be used with DLP or laser LBS/FBS optical machine;
●C series monochrome monochrome optical waveguide, 28-40 FoV, mainly used for consumption /sports/information prompt CLASS AR glasses, can be matched with MicroLED light machine.
Light-driven C series diffracted optical waveguides
It is worth mentioning that in the future AR terminal, in addition to the core optical and display function module, three-dimensional perception and interaction will also become an indispensable core technology module. Looking to the future, the accumulation of technology and products in three-dimensional sensing may provide more possibilities for the company to promote the development of the AR industry in a broader dimension.