SkyWater and Lumotive Announce Qualification and Production Start for World’s First Commercially Available Optical Beamforming Chip

By: SkyWater Technology via Business Wire

May 01, 2024 at 07:05 AM EDT

SkyWater Technology (NASDAQ: SKYT), the trusted technology realization partner, and Lumotive, a pioneer in optical semiconductor technology for 3D sensing, announced today that the companies have collaborated on the production implementation of Lumotive’s groundbreaking solid-state optical beamforming technology in SkyWater’s manufacturing environment. Fully qualified and released for volume production utilizing SkyWater’s unique Technology as a Service (TaaS) model, Lumotive’s product represents the first ever programmable optical metasurface that has been commercialized into a mass-producible chip.

Optical beamforming is a critical technology used in a range of applications, from laser communications and LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) to imaging and remote sensing. Lumotive’s Light Control Metasurface (LCM™) technology defies the laws of physics by manipulating light at the subwavelength level using nanostructures fabricated onto the surface of a silicon chip. Beams of light can be shaped, split and steered electronically with digital precision and repeatability. This marks a dramatic transformation over traditional mechanical methods, and enables significant system-level advantages in compactness, durability, speed, precision, power consumption, reliability, design flexibility and scalability for the next generation of industrial sensors, robotics, autonomous vehicles and other applications that rely on accurate 3D sensing.

In less than two years, Lumotive and SkyWater collaborated on the development and release of a custom photonics process to create LM10, Lumotive’s first LCM product offering. This new process has been qualified in SkyWater’s production environment and establishes the first commercially available chip-scale beam steering solution for solid-state LIDAR. LM10 is already shipping worldwide as the beam steering solution inside lead customers’ qualified 3D sensors.

The arrival of programmable LCM-powered beam steering with dynamic scanning and software-definable capabilities enables solid-state LIDAR to become the new standard for precise and adaptable interaction with the physical world in real time. According to Lumotive Founder and CTO Dr. Gleb Akselrod, “The capability to shape and steer light with a single chip is already revolutionizing applications such as 3D sensing, with many more on the horizon.”

Dr. Akselrod continued: “Achieving our full LM10 LCM chip qualification in SkyWater’s production process marks a watershed moment in the field of optical metamaterials. The ability to produce compact, adaptive programmable optics using well-established and scalable silicon fabrication techniques will forever change a wide range of industries, from 3D sensing to optical communications to AR/VR displays. We are proud to have made this a reality together with SkyWater.”

“We are pleased to have reached this milestone with Lumotive in support of their design and production goals,” said Ross Miller, SkyWater’s SVP of Commercial and Aerospace & Defense Business. “This is another example of how we are helping enable our customers’ differentiated and disruptive technologies with unique process development and integration capabilities. Lumotive is bringing a new and exciting innovation to the field of solid-state LIDAR, enabling significantly smaller devices with lower power consumption and reduced system cost.”

For more details on Lumotive’s LM10 LCM chip, please visit: https://lumotive.com/lm10.

About Lumotive

Lumotive’s award-winning optical semiconductor solutions enable advanced sensing and perception capabilities in next-generation consumer, mobility, and industrial automation products such as mobile devices, autonomous vehicles, and robots. The company’s patented Light Control Metasurface (LCM™) beam steering chips deliver an unparalleled combination of high performance, exceptional reliability, and low cost — all in a tiny, easily integrated solution. Lumotive has received measurable industry acclaim including Fierce Electronics’ 2021 Startup of the Year award, CES Innovation Awards in 2022 and 2024, Fast Company’s Next Big Thing in Tech 2023, a 2022 SPIE PRISM Award, and a prestigious Edison Award. Investors include Gates Frontier, MetaVC Partners, Quan Funds, Samsung Ventures, and Uniquest.

About SkyWater Technology

SkyWater (NASDAQ: SKYT) is a U.S.-based semiconductor manufacturer and a DMEA-accredited Category 1A Trusted Foundry. SkyWater’s Technology as a Service model streamlines the path to production for customers with development services, volume production and heterogeneous integration solutions in its world-class U.S. facilities. This pioneering model enables innovators to co-create the next wave of technology within diverse categories including mixed-signal CMOS, read-out ICs, rad-hard ICs, MEMS, superconducting ICs, photonics and interposers. SkyWater serves growing markets including aerospace & defense, automotive, biomedical, cloud & computing, consumer, industrial and IoT. For more information, visit: www.skywatertechnology.com.

SkyWater Technology Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains “forward-looking” statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including statements that are based on the Company’s current expectations or forecasts of future events, rather than past events and outcomes, and such statements are not guarantees of future performance. Forward-looking statements are subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions, which may cause the Company’s actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Key factors that could cause the Company’s actual results to be different than expected or anticipated include, but are not limited to, factors discussed in the “Risk Factors” section of its annual report on Form 10-K and quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, and in other documents that the Company files with the SEC, which are available at http://www.sec.gov. The Company assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date of this press release.

SKYT-CORP

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240501341611/en/

Contacts

Lumotive Company Contact: Kevin Camera | kevin.camera@lumotive.com

Lumotive Media Contact: Ran Xu | ran@rosebudpr.io

SkyWater Company Contact: Tara Luther | 952-851-5023 | tara.luther@skywatertechnology.com

SkyWater Media Contact: Lauri Julian | 949-280-5602 | lauri.julian@skywatertechnology.com

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SkyWater and Lumotive Announce Qualification and Production Start for World’s First Commercially Available Optical Beamforming Chip

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