DigiLens Adds Capital
Are waveguides applications for finding the ‘perfect wave’ at beaches across the globe, or are they those plastic things at the ends of sci-fi weaponry that help aliens shoot straight? No, they are neither of those but are a key component for XR products, especially AR devices. While most folks are focused on the metrics of the display used in XR products, in AR the user must be able to clearly see what is in front of him, while in VR the display is the visual objective. In order to get an image to AR glasses, the display image has to be combined with the actual visual image seen by the user, and that is done by optically combining the two sources. The waveguide operates a bit light the optical fiber that brings entertainment to your home. The display that carries the ‘overlay’ image into the waveguide which then reflects the image from side to side through the waveguide while moving it forward until it reaches the users eye. While the waveguide is nearly 100% reflective on the interior, it is also transparent allowing the user to see both images at the same time.
In order to get the image to move through the waveguide it must be injected at an angle and the refractive index of the waveguide material must be high or the field of view will be relatively small, meaning you would be limited to a narrow left/right and up/down view. That is where specialty glass producers such as Corning (GLW), who happens to be an investor in waveguide producer DigiLens (pvt) come in, creating such highly refractive glass that make waveguides viable. There are a number of ways in which waveguides can be applied to AR products and other optical techniques can be used to create an AR system, such as mirrors and prisms, but waveguides are a hot topic in the AR world and are considered one of the leading technologies for AR going forward, especially because they allow the display projection system to be small and less bulky that most optical combiners.
The problem with waveguides is they are more difficult to produce that typical display glass and must have uniformity and surface roughness metrics that are an order of magnitude better than those of display glass. They are produced on wafers, which increases the cost of production but also allows for patterns to be etched in the glass that help to gather more light, and as such processes are more similar to semiconductor manufacturing, there is considerable room for advances to be made in production techniques.
DigiLens produces such waveguides and has just raised an additional $50m, bringing its capital from investors to $160m in 7 rounds. Some of the investors in those rounds are Samsung Electronics (005930.KS), Universal Display (OLED), Dolby (DLB), and Corning, along with a number of US and foreign VCs, and will help push the company’s more specialized waveguide technology into volume production over the next year. Given that their manufacturing process is scalable and cost effective while having better FOV and overall characteristics than competitive offerings, the company feels that they can dominate the waveguide space going forward. We note that while there are other optical systems available to AR designers, waveguides are the most common in our AR database, especially among those AR devices that have been announced but not yet released.
In order to get the image to move through the waveguide it must be injected at an angle and the refractive index of the waveguide material must be high or the field of view will be relatively small, meaning you would be limited to a narrow left/right and up/down view. That is where specialty glass producers such as Corning (GLW), who happens to be an investor in waveguide producer DigiLens (pvt) come in, creating such highly refractive glass that make waveguides viable. There are a number of ways in which waveguides can be applied to AR products and other optical techniques can be used to create an AR system, such as mirrors and prisms, but waveguides are a hot topic in the AR world and are considered one of the leading technologies for AR going forward, especially because they allow the display projection system to be small and less bulky that most optical combiners.
The problem with waveguides is they are more difficult to produce that typical display glass and must have uniformity and surface roughness metrics that are an order of magnitude better than those of display glass. They are produced on wafers, which increases the cost of production but also allows for patterns to be etched in the glass that help to gather more light, and as such processes are more similar to semiconductor manufacturing, there is considerable room for advances to be made in production techniques.
DigiLens produces such waveguides and has just raised an additional $50m, bringing its capital from investors to $160m in 7 rounds. Some of the investors in those rounds are Samsung Electronics (005930.KS), Universal Display (OLED), Dolby (DLB), and Corning, along with a number of US and foreign VCs, and will help push the company’s more specialized waveguide technology into volume production over the next year. Given that their manufacturing process is scalable and cost effective while having better FOV and overall characteristics than competitive offerings, the company feels that they can dominate the waveguide space going forward. We note that while there are other optical systems available to AR designers, waveguides are the most common in our AR database, especially among those AR devices that have been announced but not yet released.
- VR/AR Optical Systems - Source: virtualrealitypop.com
Schott 300mm high index wafer with litho-printed waveguides - Source: ESG
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