BIC Presents: Visioning the Future of Advanced Optics

Welcome to BIC Presents, a podcast series from the Berkshire Innovation Center innovating locally, thinking globally. Welcome back to the BIC Presents podcast. I'm your host PJ Moynihan. I'm here in the studio today with a couple of smart young men here who are going to talk all about a technology you've never heard of before in all likelihood. So I'm going to turn it over to Vince from Myrius Optics. He's going to introduce himself, talk a bit about his company. So my name is Vince and I'm the Chief Technology Officer of Myrius Optics. I did my PhD in Polymer Science and Engineering at UMass Amherst. In the process, we developed an advanced material set for metasurfaces printed optics by additive manufacturing approaches. And since then, we've patented spun it out into the company and are working on commercialization and scale-up. Thank you, Vince. And we have Justin McKinnon, a longtime friend of the BIC. Yeah, so my name is Justin McKinnon. I'm a Principal Scientist at Electromagnetic Applications. We're a small business tech company that specializes in the test and simulation of harsh environments. We focus in survivability, making sure things fit their end uses. And we're very heavily invested in the meta-optics industry. OK, so to bridge in, we're going to be talking about meta-optic technology or meta-lenses today. And your two companies have been collaborating on a project in this content area through a grant provided by MassTech Collaborative. You want to talk about the grant and where you're at and sort of what that process entails? Yeah, I can certainly take that one. So back in 2020, I first met Dr. Jim Watkins, who's one of the co-founders of Vince's company here. And we got a grant from Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, or MassTech, from the M2i2 program. And that was really my first foray into understanding the technology that Merius was beginning to cook up. I didn't even know Merius was a company at that time. And that enabled us to establish some manufacturing capability to be able to build some of the equipment that we have in our lab today. And that partnership kind of grew and expanded into the Collaborative Research and Development grant that we currently have ongoing between EMA, UMass, and through that Merius. And with that, that's going to bring some strategic capabilities that I'm sure Vince will get into here. He can talk about it a lot better than I can to manufacture these novel advanced meta-optics and meta-surfaces there. But as part of any form of commercialization, what I think EMA is really good at and kind of what we bring to the table with that is, you know, we have our space radiation effects chamber here. It is the only on-demand, terrestrially third-party available commercial space chamber in the U.S. that you can call up and get into there. And we use it as a demonstrator so we can take things that would take years to either get access to a facility or you have to send it to the space station to age it. While we're adding through the grant the ability to do a lot more optical characterization, so we age it in space, for example, what did we do to it? It doesn't just get older, some of the properties change. And then that requires a lot of collaborative, hence the name of the grant there, because I'm never going to understand the optics side of it as well as the Merius team does. And likewise, they're not going to invest in space or lightning or radiated effects the way that the EMA has, so it's a really good partnership. So the grant allows Merius to sort of advance your meta-optics manufacturing process, and then Justin, your company comes and sort of tests those objects, those artifacts, or those products on the back end. So Vince, you want to, I have a hunch that very few people listening to the podcast know what a meta-lens or what meta-optics actually are. So do you want to break it down for us like we're, give us the 101? Yeah, you know, it's a new buzzword in the industry, and so where I would probably put that division is traditional optics, meta-optics, traditional lenses, meta-lenses. So a lens like glasses or something on the back of your cell phone focusing optic, right? So a meta-lens is working on similar properties in that it does the same thing. It focuses the light. The way it does this is very different. So where a typical lens has thickness and curvature to it, which is ending up bending the light to a single point. In a meta-surface, you're using nanopattern surface, which is all flat, thin layer lens that is using post sizes to diffract the light to the same degree. So this is where using nanotechnology, advanced materials, and therefore also an advanced manufacturing platform, you can make these surfaces of nanopattern optics. That also gives you as nanoscale resolution, which allows you to do things that conventional optics or traditional optics can't do. So things like controlling polarization, a few other different parameters. You can also combine functionalities into a single layer that's also still very thin. So compact, more functionality, and then novel properties. So this is where there are some key differentiators between traditional optics and meta-optics. And they're created through an additive manufacturing process. So 3D printing in other words. That's correct. Yeah, 3D printing at a very small scale that we do a whole surface at a time. So we call it nanoimprint lithography. It's essentially a stamping process, right? Like you go to the airport, you get your passport stamped. It's very similar. We're using an advanced material, a nanopattern template. We roll it on, cure it, release it, takes a couple of minutes, and you have nanoscale resolution. How does that compare to how optics, say, production has traditionally worked? So going back to the comparison with conventional optics, you have glass lenses that have been ground and polished back to Galileo's time. And then you have more current, probably injection-molded microlenses or small lenses that are cheaper. So this is where you have glass-molded ground lenses being more expensive, but potentially higher quality. Plastic lenses that are made additively more inexpensive, but achieve approximately the same thing. So in meta-optics, you have a very similar thing, right? You have a subtractive approach where you have to go through an expensive patterning technique and etching, cleaning, multiple steps, multiple tools. And then you have an additive approach like the approach that we've patented where you can do the stamping process. It's very rapid. It's very cost-effective. And you get a lot of the same properties as an inorganic glass or high-quality, subtractively processed meta-optic. And so what are the materials that you're using to produce the meta-optics or the meta-lenses? So it's a class of advanced materials called nanoparticle composites. So we start with nanocrystals that have high refractive index, high transparency, high processability. So we can formulate anything from titanium, zirconia, you know, arsenal of other types of nanoparticle materials, depending on what you're trying to do for your final optic. And you can process them all very similarly. So you can coat them on a substrate, you can put this template on, you can cure them, release it, and you end up with the meta-optic. And did the performance of these materials sort of outpace traditional lenses in terms of their capabilities? There's a few distinguishing factors. So a meta-surface, we say it's 1/100th the thickness of a human hair or one micron. Essentially, the active layer is invisible to the naked eye. So you get a very compact, very lightweight, very optically active surface, which you couldn't do with a glass or a plastic lens. So that's one huge advantage for lightweighting, making things more compact. And then, as I was mentioning earlier, new functionality. So building in polarization control, something that you could, you know, you can polarize light with a wire grid polarizer, but you lose 50% of it. So things that you wouldn't be able to do with traditional optical building blocks. And then the last would be combining functionality. So in a typical optical chain, you'll have maybe a diffractive optical element and a collimator. But here's one where you can really combine functionalities of multiple optics into one meta-surface by encoding that information into the nanostructure itself. So they make these little tiny lenses over there in the lab at UMass, and then they send them off to EMA for testing. And so now you're blasting these with, what, radiation? And Lord knows what else, you know, talk about the testing of these artifacts. Yeah, I think it's a really interesting area for us because, you know, the ability to do testing in space is still kind of new to the industry. You know, there's some government research centers that can do it, but you can't call them and get in there on a Monday or anything like that. And likewise, you have a lot of red tape. So a lot of the work that we're getting to do is exploratory and kind of the establishing first of the capabilities. We have our space chamber. We've added a proton source to it, which lets us do all sorts of different things. There's a lot more than just the space aspects for it. When you're thinking of a traditional military application, it needs ultimate reliability. It is not allowed to fail in those cases. And there's a lot of military standards for certain types of testing. There is no standardization for how you test optical devices like this. So in a lot of the work that EMA does, we work with a lot of the tier one and the prime OEMs and things like that to do all the integrations there. So we're trying to take the knowledge that we gain through our work in consulting and testing, try to share it with the Marius team and kind of be a conduit for all the good stuff there. But as far as the testing for it, if you were to bring it in space, it's going to get exposed to all sorts of different flavors of radiation. So these are energetic particles. If you imagine you're holding a sheet of drywall and I throw a marble at it very softly, it might bounce off and that's akin to surface charge. And it's a little bit of energy deposited in the piece of drywall that we're holding. And sometimes you throw them kind of medium like it's stuck in there or you throw it really hard and it might go all the way through. And one of the limiting factors in all areas of defense and aerospace is the understanding of how things work after you buy them and after you field them. So if I'm a big contractor and I have a billion dollar contract and this is a key capability that this device handles, if it doesn't work in seven years, I can't buy it. And there's not really a good avenue to explore that. It's really expensive to try to take things that have never been done before and build up machinery and things to even do the characterization. So a lot of I think the grant that really is enabling us to do with that is to kind of take the time to learn how to do that the right way. So it's aging. It is understanding what the, in this case, the space environment will do to the posts and things on there. These are kind of conductive or kind of not. There's parts in there. There's resins and things that are under high vacuum and high voltage do weird things. We know this from the way traditional materials behave. So a lot of it's uncharted territory and there's no Wikipedia page for how this stuff is going to behave. So it's really true R&D and I think it's a lot of fun. Well, and so in my caveman brain, this feels like real next gen technology. And I imagine it has a broad application across industry. So what are some of the core applications for the deployment of meta-optics in, you know, let's say in the next three to five years? Yeah, you know, so for our company where we're doing nanopattern surfaces, one that we get a lot of attention to is augmented reality waveguides or waveguides in general. So these are for near eye displays or spectrometers or other optical systems. So that's a big one for us as well. On the meta-optics side, there's any number of them, you know, high powered laser systems, light weighting, compact for consumer electronics, new functionalities like I was mentioning about polarization control for anything from biometrics to imaging and, you know, full-stokes imaging cameras, those kinds of things. So I think the community is just starting to figure out exactly what to do with meta-optics. And as we progress, I think some of the best applications will fall out of combining meta-optics with traditional optics and getting kind of the best of both worlds. So I would say the industry is just starting to scratch the surface, but it's really interesting where people are thinking of putting these. What do you think, Justin, in terms of where you see sort of the direct application of these things making headway sooner than later? Yeah, right. I mean, the size, really what has been the most interesting part is I've gotten to kind of get my feet under me and understand the technology and what it means is the size, the ability, you know, if you think of, and Vince mentioned it like the camera on the back of your phone, it has limitations because of the size and how curved you can make the lens. And you can just design a lens that is extremely thin and put dozens of them in the footprint, probably even more, for that matter, of a traditional lens there. And so if each one of those devices is tuned to a specific application, you get ultimate performance in like the same focus area, same footprint there, but many, many different things. And that's really cool because there's a term called refractive index. It means a lot in the optics industry, but that's essentially the angles that light you can bend and kind of focus to a point there. And the larger that that is, the harder a technical problem it is, but the more you can see if you're a lens. And light is data and data can be processed and that's how we generate pictures. And we send information, think of fiber optics, think of what light is the fastest thing known to man. Nothing moves faster than a copper is slow. So we're seeing lots of excitement around AI and video, the big graze within video and all the data centers there. The more things you have connected, the more data you need to pass between them. And the only way to do it efficiently is through light. Light's very fragile. You have to convert it to and from, you know, you don't read light, you read the state of the light and information about its characteristics. And then that goes to a computer that turns it into information and does something with it. So if you do that faster, light doesn't give off as much heat. So that means that it's a lot more energy efficient. And in that area, if we're really in the golden age, the beginning of this AI revolution there, I don't see how you get there without advanced technologies like this. Well, and so this is advanced technology that's being spun out of a lab at UMass Amherst, the state's flagship university. And you're in the process, Vince, through myrius of commercializing this technology. So you want to talk about sort of where you're at with this going from lab into actual commercialization of the products. Yeah. So the MassTech grant for UMass was able to open up some open access facilities. So the advanced optics characterization facility, the advanced optics manufacturing facility, which Myrius pays to have access for both of those. That gives us access to laser tables and, you know, top of the line characterization systems that we can tune and adjust to what we need to test these optics. Manufacturing facility gives us access to tools for R&D scale development, optimizing performance. And so that really quick feedback loop all in the same facility allows us to really quick cycle times on this development and get optimized devices really quickly. On top of that, as a company, you know, we're working over in Europe to do some pilot scale manufacturing. So working on eight-inch scale tool sets, making a thousand metal lenses at a time, coming back with, you know, eight cassettes full of 25 wafers. I'll let you do the math on how many lenses that is. But it's a lot of throughput and a lot of samples for us to test. And so that's really promising for us to be able to scale this technology as well as having the help from MTC and UMass and as an incubator space growing us and helping us do quick cycle development. You know, one of the themes that we continue to draw out through the BIC here is the upside of the proximity of innovation to manufacturing. And so here we have the proximity of the lab to production to testing as well. So you want to talk about sort of the triangulation of those things and how that just really helped expedite the overall development cycle. Yeah, I mean, we at EMA, we certainly were the beneficiary of that process, getting stood up where we kind of came to the city of Pittsfield and the city said, wow, what you guys are doing is really cool. And they invested and we went to MassTech and said, we need a lot of expensive equipment and I think we've got a good foothold out here. And, you know, through M2I2, they invested. And then obviously with Marius, UMass and EMA, we were able to get the collab R&D. And so, you know, that's unique about the state and that they really do invest when they say they're interested in something. And what that enables you to do is exactly as you said, is that triangulation there, where you can't be an expert in all areas. So that you have to kind of create an ecosystem around it to do it. You know, I'm never going to be able to explain in technical detail the way that Vince does and the Marius guys do about their technology. But I get absorbed to it. And I, you know, my travels and in the work that I do, you know, more or less at EMA, I spend a lot of time consulting. So I'm seeing end uses. I'm working with the Department of Defense and airplane companies and things like that. And that creates a feedback loop where I use that normally to feed the capabilities that we have at EMA or, you know, if I for grants or programs or chase work. But when you have that open line of communication there with a manufacturing facility to make something, we can feed that in. And one of the cool activities I think that is probably my favorite outcome of the grant here is we have a capability at EMA that we're standing up where we're working a lot in AIML and doing process optimization. And this is good of a pilot run for that, you know, where they know their physics and we know the math and stuff to do the optimization there. And it just cuts down on the number of trial and error cycles that you have. And then you already have the way to do the R&D at UMass. You have the way to test it here. So we can iterate millions of times faster, potentially millions of times faster once we kind of perfect that. And that blueprint is, I don't know, anywhere else is doing it. I mean, it's really exciting. I'm certainly having a good time being involved with it, definitely learning a lot. And it's really cool. Well, it is exciting. It's exciting that it's happening here in the Berkshires as well. And so Vince, you know, sort of to wrap up here, what excites you about being involved with this company and with this technology? And, you know, so what do you see as where it's all leading? Yeah, well, just to turn it into Justin's was some of the best innovation happens at the interface of disciplines, right? And so this is where the AIML is very exciting for us as well, because it shortens our time to optimize manufacturing. We can do enough product output and enough data acquisition to feed into those kinds of systems. They're experts on their side, we're experts on our side. It's a general great meeting of the mind. And so just looking forward, continuing these collaborations, growing both sides, getting a better understanding from both sides as well, and then just pushing forward on getting to manufacturing with as high a yield, as high a quality and being as enabling of a technology for the entire field as possible, just getting it out there into the hands of people as they start developing next gen optical systems and planning for future generation devices. And I mean, I'm imagining everything from fiber optics to micro processors to clearly aerospace and defense and all these consumer electronics. I mean, it seems like there's a pretty darned broad application for this stuff. And we're just sort of scratching the surface of it. Yeah, we love using the term platform technology because there's just so much you can do with optics and especially with a technique like this, where you can develop any number of devices that have different functionality, work at different wavelengths and all have these benefits of lightweight, compact, new functionality, combined functionality. Like you mentioned, photonics, PIX, PLCs, polarization systems, polarization splitters or filters, augmented reality, the list goes on and on. So there's lots of big applications and industries that this will go into. And it becomes a tool for innovation, right? I think the best part about, again, mentioning the, I'm very well traveled to the MA. We work with a ton of different companies and there's a lot of excitement that gets kind of left by the wayside in terms of new technology because it has to be so mature by the time that it gets there. And when you have the big military contracts or many, many, many years and so you have to get in on day one and be mature on day one to be able to do it. And that stifles a lot of really cool applications that just aren't possible. And so, you know, when you have a technology like MetaOptics there, we don't even know what has been thought of but couldn't be done because the technology wasn't there. And so when you lay the groundwork for doing all the characterization, all the work that Marius is doing, standing up a process. And then on day one, they can do it at scale when they're up and running. I mean, we can't even dream of the stuff that's going to be possible with that. And that's really cool. So Tony Stark, eat your heart out, right? And, you know, I really appreciate you guys coming on today to tell us a bit about this exciting technology and, you know, look forward to keeping an eye on both of your companies, certainly, and this MetaOptics technology as it continues to evolve. Yeah, thanks. Thanks, Peter. For more conversations like this or for resources on innovation in Berkshire County, be sure to head over to BerkshireInnovationsCenter.com.