SkyWater and Lumotive Announce Qualification and Production Start for World’s First Commercially Available Optical Beamforming Chip
SkyWater Technology (SKYT) and Lumotive have collaborated to produce the world's first commercially available optical beamforming chip. Lumotive's product, utilizing SkyWater's Technology as a Service model, is a programmable optical metasurface that revolutionizes 3D sensing technology. The chip enables precise light manipulation at a subwavelength level, offering advantages in compactness, durability, speed, power consumption, and scalability for industrial sensors, autonomous vehicles, and more. The collaboration has resulted in the LM10 chip, which is already shipping globally and is set to redefine solid-state LIDAR technology for real-time interactions with the physical world.
Lumotive and SkyWater have successfully collaborated to create the world's first commercially available optical beamforming chip, marking a significant technological advancement in 3D sensing applications.
The LM10 chip developed through this partnership offers precise light manipulation with digital precision and repeatability, providing system-level advantages in various industries such as industrial sensors, robotics, and autonomous vehicles.
While the collaboration between Lumotive and SkyWater has resulted in a groundbreaking technology, there may be challenges in scaling production and adoption of the LM10 chip in the market.
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
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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.
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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
Source: SkyWater Technology
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