Скачать или смотреть WHAT'S NEXT FOR PLANAR OPTICS DESIGN?

My Optica colleague Olga Raz is constantly looking for new ways to help our corporate members find strategic partners. As we mentioned here recently, many photonics companies are improving their storytelling, which is becoming essential in an increasingly complex world. In this case, she got interesting insights into what’s next for meta-lens design from Lieven Penninck, the co-founder and CEO of Optica corporate member PlanOpSim based in Gent, Belgium. I’ll leave it to Olga to pick up the story.

Optica corporate member PlanOpSim, based in Gent, Belgium, develops software that makes it much easier to design meta-lenses. Their excellent website includes several videos explaining how tiny meta-surface lens building blocks of about six hundred nanometers, can achieve the same resolution and magnification as a lens of 5-6 centimeters.

Technology is shrinking - smaller phones, smaller laptops, smaller everything, but shrinking lenses, like those found in cameras and microscopes, remain challenging. Material scientists are trying to replace glass lenses with
something lighter and smaller based on "meta-surfaces" or engineered materials. In a meta-surface lens, tiny towers of titanium dioxide are arranged in a specific pattern to focus light. Different patterns focus on different colours of light.

Part of my job as a technical director at Optica is helping companies like PlanOpSim find strategic partners to grow their business. While talking with Lieven Penninck, the co-founder and CEO, I was very impressed with his clear story about what’s next and what challenges still need to be solved for metalenses to scale faster. Since that story is not (yet) on their website, I got permission to record “What’s next for Planer Optics?” The result was a fascinating conversation that fits the LinkedIn limit, so I thought I would share it publicly. I’m sure you will agree that the team really know what they are doing. Feel free to reach out to me if you want an introduction to them or to connect with an expert. They also offer trial versions of their software to experiment with.