Cheap Android phones can now offer sophisticated FaceID-like solutions similar to high-end iPhones, and any device can now offer high-end 3D sensing capabilities. Metalenz, a Boston startup that has pioneered cheap metasurfaces that can replace expensive biometric sensors in phones, announced recently that they’re ready for mass production.
Metalenz has already shipped “more than 140 million” of the its optic sensors for consumer devices, but this unlocks faster and cheaper production that could bring its sensors to a wider market. The technology prints lenses on silicon, up to 10,00 per 12″ wafer, that can then be manufactured into individual lenses for smartphones and other applications.
“Android phones have wanted biometric authentication, but haven’t been able to essentially foot the bill because it’s too expensive,” CEO Rob Devlin told me when first announcing the technology on the TechFirst podcast. “It really hasn’t propagated outside of the iPhone because that module is very expensive, very complicated, and takes up a lot of space.”
With the recent manufacturing breakthrough, the company is ready to expand production by an order of magnitude, Devlin said in a statement. Metalenz is working with UMC, a Taiwan-based semiconductor foundry company that has a total production capacity of 400,000 wafers per month.
“Polar ID is ready to meet the demands of high-volume consumer electronics, and to bring secure, affordable face authentication to billions of devices,” he said. ”We are now leveraging the unique capabilities of our technology to bring new forms of sensing to mass markets for the first time.”
Metalenz’ Polar ID is a polarizing sensor. That allows the sensor to read complex structural and composition data for whatever it images, including your face. Because even a perfect mask of your face has a different physical composition than actual human skin and flesh, polarization can tell the difference with high fidelity.
That’s one of the things that makes Apple’s FaceID high-security, but it’s been expensive to replicate. A year ago, Metalenz’ technology cost about a third of Apple’s; now with higher-volume production it should be cheaper yet. That enables cheaper phones to still offer high levels of security.
There’s potential other uses as well.
Since polarization understand the chemical composition of what it senses, metasurfaces that offer the technology could be useful in medical applications. Lab-based sensors can cost $1,000 or more, but now you could have similar information in a $5 or even cheaper sensor in a phone or other device.
“It’s a whole new information set that hasn’t been there for users,” Devlin told me a year ago. “There are a known set of applications you can look at, say a growth on skin, and you can tell whether it’s cancerous based off of the polarization information. You can do things like air quality monitoring. So you can actually, with polarization, tell what the local air quality is.”
Ultimately, as metasurfaces continue to get cheaper and cheaper to manufacture, they could be embedded in more and more consumer and industrial devices, offering deeper levels of intelligence for robots, manufacturing machines, and consumer devices about what they’re seeing, handling, and producing.
“With demand for secure and convenient biometrics rapidly expanding across consumer devices and IoT, Polar ID delivers secure face authentication in the smallest, simplest form factor, making advanced sensing accessible beyond premium tiers and in places it wasn’t previously possible,” says Devlin.
Competitors include Trinamix, which offers a face-authentication module for smartphones that is integrated behind an OLED display, and conventional 3D visible light and infrared solutions.
