M. Noonen
Swave Photonics, California, United States
Keywords: Augmented Reality, Holography, Tunable Photonics, Immersive Displays
Swave Photonics is a fabless semiconductor company that is creating holographic chips based on proprietary diffractive photonics technology and phase change materials. Swave’s technology was developed over 10 years at imec, the world-leading R&D center in Belgium. Swave’s mission is to bring spatial computing to life and enable display manufacturers and content creators to disrupt the visualization market with immersive, ultra-high-resolution, lifelike, true holographic displays. Swave’s Holographic eXtended Reality (HXR) technology is the ultimate display technology, delivering lifelike, high-resolution 3D images indistinguishable from reality. Swave’s HXR technology projects lifelike holographic images that eliminate today’s AR/VR/XR challenges of focal depth and eye tracking, so viewers can easily focus on nearby and faraway objects. Most importantly, the HXR chips are manufactured using standard CMOS technology, which enables cost-effective scaling. True holography requires diffractive optics and a pixel-pitch that is half the wavelength of light (~250nm). Swave’s HXR technology is an order of magnitude smaller than existing technologies and the only one capable of true holography. The use of phase change materials is the beginning of the Tunable Photonics era; a photonics breakthrough but with semiconductor economics. Swave is based in Leuven, Belgium and Menlo Park, CA.