Welcome to poLight's first ever Capital Market Day. It's a pleasure to see that so many could be here face-to-face, even though there was a couple of canceled flights, so we are missing someone, but hopefully they are able to participate through webcast. My name is Øyvind Isaksen. I'm the CEO of poLight. Has been there for soon eight years now. The agenda of today, actually, today I will do the least speaking. I will leave it to my fantastic team to talk. You're probably so used to hear me anyway. You're gonna meet some fantastic people in the team. I will do a welcome introduction. Also would like to mention that Grethe Viksas, our chairman. No, that's wrong, isn't it?
Chair of the board. Yeah, chair of the board. Newly elected, been in the board for four years already, independent, and took over as chair of the board after the shareholder meeting a few days ago. Welcome, Grethe Viksås, and she will be here and also for you is here face-to-face, can meet Grethe Viksås and mingle with her. Rest of my team today is Jon Edwards, VP Business Development. I will present him in a little bit more details soon. Pierre Craen, the CTO. Marianne Sandal, the COO. Lars Henriksen, who is head of R&D Lab, which will show you some products and manufacturing processes. Maybe you would like to have a tour of the lab, and he can show you around there.
He's basically 18 years and more in poLight, so he knows everything. Okay. Let me start. It's been a long run, and we have a lot of patient shareholders. Back in 2005, everything started. Part of different companies then. What I would like to emphasize without going through the details here now, that we have basically gone into a new era in the company now. After we got the first design wins in 2020, and also four new ones in 2021, we are participating in the league with different platform. Now we can talk to the customers with references. We can talk to the customers showing products commercially available. That's a completely different ballgame.
We've been having shareholders with us in many rounds, and thanks to them who has been with us for so many years. Without that, and without an IPO, without small, eager, competent shareholders, we wouldn't be here today. For those who are new to poLight, very quick, we are a global player. We do tunable optics, which is a space which is getting more and more attention. There are different technologies there, which Pierre and John will talk about. We have a strong IP situation. Pierre will talk more about that. We are a growing team, but still small, 34 employees. You know, I've been asked to restart due to technical problems, or maybe I was misspelling something. Welcome to poLight's very first Capital Market Day. My name is Øyvind Isaksen.
I'm the CEO of poLight. The agenda of today is a short welcome from myself. Jon Edwards, VP, Business Development, will be talking about market focus and opportunities. We will have our CTO, Pierre Craen, talking about technology platform and roadmap. We're gonna have a short break. Marianne Sandal, the COO, will talk about operational setup and show you a nice video live from our assembly partners. We're gonna have a break or not a break, we're gonna have a Q&A session. We're gonna have a demo lab, and that will end the webcast, and we will then also serve you some snack outside if you want.
Together with me today, to start with, the top lady is Chair of the Board, newly elected, Grethe Viksaas, heavily experienced IT business lady, Basefarm, who you may know from Basefarm. She's here today. She will not be presenting, but she will be available when you are mingling outside afterwards. Jon Edwards will do ASL, as I said, Pierre Craen, Marianne Sandal, COO, and manager of the lab, Lars Henriksen. Okay. Just briefly on the history and the milestone. It's a long story, and we have basically been dependent on a lot of patient shareholders and employees. What I would like to emphasize on since 2020 and 2021, we finally managed to get into commercial products.
That has basically been creating a completely different platform for us when communicating to the market. You know, selling to a customer without the reference is so much harder than selling to a customer with a reference. We can ask the customer, we can show them products, we can tell them that we have supplied, we are in mass production, and a lot of the uncertainty and questions are basically answered by itself. It was a long journey to get there, and it's been so many phases in the company. There's been technology issues, there's been reliability issues, there's been so many issues. I'm glad to say that we are now playing in that champions league on a different platform.
That's, I feel, well deserved from the team, and also thanks to the shareholders, which has been both big and small. Thanks to an IPO, we are able to finance the company to the stage we are today. For those who are new, just quickly, poLight is a part of the space we call tunable optics. We of course have the opinion that we have the tunable optics, but we also take the position as we'll come back to as being technology neutral, if that is shown necessary to do. We have been around for a long time, as mentioned. We have a strong IP situation. CTO will talk more about that. We are a growing team, 34 employees. Even though still small, very distributed and very dedicated team.
I've been impressed with what the team has been able to absorb, if you look at all the activity we are carrying out. We are headquartered here in Horten, in new, nice offices. We have offices in Finland and China, and also employees sitting either in home office or rented offices in France, U.K., USA, Taiwan, and Russia. Russian guy is more likely to be transferred to the office in Finland for obvious reasons. Our technology, you will hear so much about it. I would just say four words, extremely fast, very compact, constant field of view, no pumping, and extremely low power consumption. Jon and Pierre will talk about why that is important.
I mentioned the design wins, which has been so important for us, which is a really, really, fantastic, obviously building block and hopefully more will come. Technology of poLight goes into many different verticals. I'm not gonna go through the details because you will hear it from Jon Edwards. Smartphone, barcode/industrial, augmented reality, and others. Others being accessories and medical, which is shown maybe the most promising areas. When it comes to the strategic direction, this is something we already communicated in one of the share issue. Definitely the focus is on organic growth. We want to grow based on existing products and get profitable. We want to take the same, very same product into different verticals, which I just mentioned, different market segments.
We have a very clear strategy that we want to be close to the customer and manufacturing partners with high competence. That's why, in a way, the headquarters set up in Horten can quickly become actually the smallest part of the whole organization, because we're gonna build infrastructure and people close to customer and close to manufacturing partners. That is very important for our strategy. We believe in having suitcases will travel, will not bond us sufficiently to customer market and manufacturing partner. We have to be there drinking tea or whatever, every day with these people and to support our manufacturing partners. That's a very important dimension. Our international organization is key and has been key during the COVID situation. Being a tech company, innovation is key for us. We spend a lot in innovation.
I would say also the last years, definitely we had to focus on getting TLens right, fixing issues, fixing manufacturing processes. We are definitely, which I've been telling in many of the quarterly reports, is that majority of the team is working on exactly that. Meaning that the development project has been on second priority. Even though in our agenda, in our long-term plans, there's a clear plan and Per will talk about it, how. By the way, don't believe everything he says because he wants to do everything tomorrow. I'm joking. Anyway, there is definitely a vision here and we want to innovate new products based on a current technology platform.
We also would like to take a position that instead of saying to a customer, "We have that particular technology and we want you to use that," we will also gradually step by step take a position of more like a solution provider. Say to them, "Okay, we are the king of tunable optics. Which kind of tunable optics is best for you?" Then we sell solution and not necessarily a dedicated component. That’s little bit the vision we also have. Also, on the right side here, for selective niche market, I think that we even can climb up in the value chain. Today we are a component supplier, but step by step we may take a position that we give more than a component, but actually a solution.
That solution could be that we take TLens into and integrate it into a adapter or even a camera in some niche markets. Some of the camera module suppliers out there are focusing heavily on high volumes only. We would like to be both the high volumes but also small volumes. For the small volume part, we may take a bigger role. This is again a strategic, it's more like a visionary positioning statement, but that's how we see it, and that's what's keeping us fighting every day. Okay. That was 1.5 welcome from me. Sorry for the technical issues there. Now we're gonna go into three very interesting presentation.
My intention is that you listen to me every quarter, you talk to me now and then through emails and what else, and it's me you meet. Today I will give you the opportunity to deep dive into the different verticals in poLight. So you're gonna meet not all, but you're gonna meet some very key people. The first one out is Jon Edwards. Jon Edwards is a very experienced businessman, business development. He has been with poLight now for 2.5-3 years. He is very experienced in similar technology companies, like Optotune, which you may know is one of our competitors, like Cambridge Mechatronics.
He's been also at STMicro and also at Sony Image Sensor. He's very capable technically speaking also, but in poLight, he is focusing on business development. Jon, take them through a fantastic presentation. I wish you a very good luck.
Excellent. Thank you, Øyvind, for that kind introduction. I'll do my best to live up to that. No pressure then. Okay. Good afternoon, everyone, and it's very nice to meet you. It's my first time meeting almost everyone here, I think. As Øyvind mentioned, I work in business development here at poLight. And also, as Øyvind mentioned, being close to our customers and close to the partners that we work with is extremely important to us. There's three of us that work in business development. In North America, based in Silicon Valley, San Francisco Bay Area, we have Tristan Ju. Tristan, prior to joining poLight, was with O-Film, one of the major camera module manufacturers, and also companies like AMS, who are very major suppliers into the AR and smartphone space. Based in Shenzhen in China, we have Redfar Yang.
Prior to joining poLight, Redfar was with Sony Mobile and also Nikon. Again, very relevant experience in camera modules and the markets that we're working with. He's based in Shenzhen to be close to not just the partners that we work with for high volume manufacturing, but also the major Chinese brands that are potential customers for us. Myself, I'm based in the U.K., the southern part of the U.K., and I cover all the European market and also Japan and Korea. First of all, we're gonna talk about smartphone. Like many other markets, smartphone of course has been very strongly impacted by COVID and the global pandemic.
In the early days, that's through people staying at home, worrying about many other things other than buying a new smartphone, and more recently through the continuing lockdowns in especially China, through constraints in availability of labor, which has knock-on impacts for the supply of components, and generally labor into the assembly, which has exacerbated a problem that was already there with the availability of the semiconductors and the general semiconductor shortage. The result is that the market's declined about 9%, this quarter, year-on-year, and that's actually the third consecutive quarter, as we've gone through the COVID epidemic. The impact of this we're seeing is that many of the smartphone manufacturers, the OEMs and the brands, are either delaying launches of new telephones as they extend the life of existing models.
We're seeing the number of new launches slowing down as well as the delays to projects that we would expect to be launched and the phones we'd expect to be launched happening later. Let's remember that this is still a 1.3 billion unit market, 1.3 billion smartphones sold every year, and that's been level at that level for give or take a few years now. That's actually the phones. Each one of those phones has at least one camera on the front and an average of about three on the back. So potentially those four cameras per smartphone are addressable to us. It's by far the largest market for cameras on the planet.
One of the features of this market, I mentioned the cameras on the front, the front cameras. As of today, very few of these have autofocus in them for various technological reasons. That means that essentially that entire 1.3 billion units of front cameras are accessible to us. Currently, there's only something like 100 million of those, and that's from very niche players or in-house technologies that aren't available to other OEMs. Despite being a very large market, it is a market that can change quite quickly. We give here, for example, if Apple were to introduce autofocus into the next iPhone, then the rest of the market would be able to follow very quickly, and we'd be looking to add autofocus into the Android phones as well.
That change could happen really quite quickly. In summary, smartphones still the highest volume opportunity for cameras anywhere. We believe that poLight and TLens is very uniquely placed to take advantage of this. There are some of the technical characteristics that Øyvind mentioned earlier, which means that TLens is very attractive to these OEMs. We'll talk about these in this slide. Things like use cases. For the front camera specifically, users like to have the shallow depth of field. When they're taking the selfie image, they like to get themselves and their face nice and crisp, and they like that lovely defocusing and bokeh effect for the things round about so as not to distract from the image.
That requires a small depth of field, which in turn from optics implies lower f-numbers. The very fact of including that means that autofocus is more important, because if you have a shallow depth of field, then you need to carefully place that depth of field to ensure that the user is there. We're seeing that the demand for autofocus in those front cameras that historically has been relatively low is greatly picking up. Then there's our technology and the benefits of that technology. Because the OEMs that we talk to tell us that TLens allows them a design flexibility in how they design their phones and how they design their handsets that they can't get from other technologies.
For example, on the right-hand side of this slide here, you see one of the camera modules that we've developed for front camera applications. If you look at that, you'll see that the very top bit, which would be the front element lens that sticks through a hole in display, is designed to be extremely small. The reason it's done like that is that allows you to make the punch hole, the opening in the display, also extremely small and much less obtrusive when you're using the phone, when you're looking at it. Giving a much slicker design that the smartphone customers tell us that they value. There are other factors about the technology that also continue that theme of design flexibility that you get from TLens.
Our technology is entirely non-magnetic, so there are no coils or big magnets that you would find in, for example, a VCM. That means that a T-Lens camera can be placed close to other magnetic systems, and there are many of these in phones, things like the earpiece speakers or magnet-driven systems. Other cameras, of course, might have VCM in them, or things like compasses, which of course you need to make sure that you keep magnets away from. The fact that we can be placed completely flexibly with any of these systems means that the designers of the phone can place the cameras where they want it to be.
We had one OEM telling us that TLens allowed them to place the camera, the punch hole, right in the corner of the display, which is something they've been trying to do for a long time and wasn't possible with any other technologies. In addition, once the TLens is designed in and once customers have it, we're finding that there are new applications that they're finding that can be enabled from the benefits of the technology. The high speed allows them to do things like all-in-focus, and we can show you a demo of that later. We worked with a company in Spain called Wooptix to develop a light field capture from a single camera.
If you have time later, if you click that link, you'll be able to see a nice demonstration of that. These are all, once the TLens is in, extra value that the phone OEM is getting from them. My last point on this slide is that I've been talking a lot about front cameras. It would be wrong to give you the impression that it's only front cameras that are of interest to us. We talk about front cameras a lot because essentially it's an open field for us. They don't have autofocus in them now, more or less, so it's an entirely open field that we can address. Back cameras, of course, are very much of interest as well, but the dynamic of that market's different.
There are established technologies that we're working to displace or design TLens into cameras that otherwise or previously have had other technologies in them. So for back cameras, it's more a matter of evolution rather than revolution. Excuse me. Next, I'd like to talk about AR or augmented reality, and I'll maybe start by defining what I mean by AR. Many of you guys might be familiar with virtual reality. You might have, for example, a Meta Oculus at home. I know my kids do. With virtual reality, it's a headset that you put on, and you're in an entirely computer-generated or virtual world. You are in no way interacting with what's going on around you. What we're more interested in talking about is augmented reality.
That's where similarly you put on a headset, but instead of being transported into an entirely computer-generated world, you're looking through the headset to your real surroundings, but with things overlaid on top of that. Those things might be relatively simple. They might be notifications like you're familiar with from your smartphone. You have a new email, your meeting's about to start, something like that. Or they might be more complex. It could be things like virtual characters or objects that are overlaid accurately in the world around you and appear to you as if they're really there.
These augmented and mixed reality use cases require much greater capability from the cameras in the systems because they have cameras to both look at what's round about them and pass it on to the user, and also to make measurements and judgments about the world round about them. AR is largely a focus on U.S. activities. Very many of the major West Coast U.S. technology companies are investing very heavily in this, both in their own development and through acquisition. There's no doubt it's an emerging market. Short term, we expect the use cases to be driven largely by enterprise and professional use, things like training, or telemedicine, and things like that. Certainly maybe the next two years. We're expecting the consumer devices to arrive late 2024, early 2025.
With the launch of those consumer devices, the market by that point will have grown, we believe, to about 100 million pieces. That's the general consensus on that number for most of the analysts. A very large emerging market with the demand for cameras. The dynamics of the market are slightly different to smartphones. Whereas many of the technology benefits that we mentioned before for smartphone carry across to AR, there's no real established solution yet. It's not like in smartphone where VCM is dominant in the back camera, for AR nobody's really cracked how to do it well. There's just a list of problems that people are trying to solve. Further, established technologies like VCM are a very poor match for AR headsets.
They're heavy, they require a lot of power, and these things mean that it's more likely that we're gonna find ourselves competing with other emerging technologies, things like SMA or other shapeable lens technologies than with VCM and AR. We will be positioning ourselves as a higher performance, lower risk alternative to these other technologies. As I mentioned, TLens, we believe, and we're hearing from the companies that we work with, can be the solution to many of the problems that they're currently facing in trying to develop those consumer devices for 2025.
We've spoken before about how TLens is very small and can make very compact cameras and of course, if it's going to be a head-mounted device that you're wearing, then you need small cameras if you want them to be unobtrusive and devices that people are going to wear often. Small size doesn't just mean XY millimeters. Mass is also important. Anything that you're wearing is balanced on your nose. It's every microgram of mass is important. There's a lot of efforts to low-mass solutions, and that's why things that rely on big magnets and coils are not a good match for this technology. The speeds that can be achieved with the TLens are extremely important. I mentioned before the demo we've done with Wooptix.
What that does is it uses the very fast speed of the TLens to take a series of images at different focal depths very quickly, much more quickly than the user can perceive. From those different images, you can extrapolate out depth information, so information about how far away things are from you. In the AR world, where you need to have a very good understanding of where you are relative to the other things, so that you can place virtual objects on them and map spaces, these use cases are really important. Potentially, we've got cameras that are being used not just for imaging, but also for sensing and generating data about the world in which is round about the user. Our lenses are completely insensitive to gravity and acceleration. That's not the case for many other technologies.
With some of the other technologies, the camera will behave differently, or it'll perform differently, depending whether it's facing up the way, left, right, down. It's not just acceleration due to gravity. We can actually move our heads relatively quickly and then induce quite a lot of acceleration in that way, and that can interfere with the operation of cameras, none of which is a problem for TLens. It's entirely insensitive to these things. Moving on to power consumption. As with smartphone, power consumption is always important. People are wanting longer battery lives. For head-mounted devices that may have very small batteries, power consumption is important because it means that the batteries last longer. It's not just about battery life.
All the energy that you take out of the battery and consume in the system ultimately turns into heat, and that heat needs to be managed in some way, especially on devices that have small areas for getting rid of heat and where you'd notice that the device itself is getting hot if it's sitting on your head. Our customers tell us that the power consumption is important to minimize the amount of heat generated in the device. More than that, there's a feature of our technology that allows us to develop athermal cameras. Athermal cameras. What do I mean by that? Basically, what I mean is that we can develop optics that'll perform exactly the same no matter what temperature the system's at. The system performance will be the same at zero degrees as at 40 degrees.
That's not the case for most autofocus actuation technologies or lens systems. The historical way of dealing with this in other camera systems has been instead of using plastic rigid lenses to use glass lens elements. Glass lens elements themselves bring lots of problems. They're very much heavier than plastic lenses, which means you need a bigger actuator to move it. If you've got a bigger actuator to move it, you're consuming more power. If you consume more power, you're generating more heat, and you go around that circle again. Using TLens and the features of our polymer, we can go into more detail on this later, but basically, all you need to understand is that it's possible to design cameras that are tolerant of a wide range of temperatures, and the performance doesn't change with the temperature.
This is something that has been very important in a lot of the work we've been doing towards the AR market. Just to finish up on this slide, it's important to say that it's not just camera opportunities that we're talking about. All of the things that I've mentioned here applies to optics in general. Whether those optics are in front of a camera or whether they're part of a display system. We're also doing an awful lot of work for the display systems in augmented reality and mixed reality devices, be that focusing lasers for laser-based displays or super resolution technologies, so-called wobulator devices that Pierre will talk to you about later on. There's, again, potential for many TLens, many poLight devices in every AR headset. Moving on to machine vision.
The module you see in the top right there is the Honeywell EX30 scan engine that Øyvind Isaksen talked about earlier on. That's been a fantastic project for us and is going very well. There's some examples of end products there with that device in them, and new ones are being launched every day. That's been a very good foothold in that market and a great reference for other industrial and machine vision applications. From that initial success, we've got growing traction across many different areas and opportunities in machine vision, and which itself is a very rapidly growing market.
There's a general need for high-quality cameras to interface computers with the world around them, either for things like automation and robotics, or for edge computing and AI, where you need to make the interface between computers and the artificial intelligence and the decisions these computers are making, needs to have the best information about what's around about them, and cameras play a very large role in that. As with many of the other things we've talked about today, the core benefits of the TLens technology, speed, small size, power consumption are all very important, as is the insensitivity to acceleration.
If you take, for example, the example of a camera on the end of a robotic arm that might be doing some automation task, the whole point of automating that is the robot can do it faster than a human can move. That means there's very rapid movements, very fast accelerations that the camera needs to cope with. Also once the automation system, the robot arm, has got to where it wants to go, the camera needs to be able to take an image, capture that image, with the lens ready, and then move on very quickly as well. The insensitivity to acceleration, gravity, no dependence on posture are all things that are important also in this market. Sometimes we find we're competing with established technologies, VCM, other tunable lenses.
Equally as often, we find that TLens is enabling entirely new applications. Things like the depth mapping as well that we've spoken about before, where you're able to do things with a TLens that enables customers and system integrators using these devices to build new applications and new systems around the features that we're doing. In contrast to the consumer markets, these markets tend to have a slightly longer life cycles, so the products run for longer and tends to be slightly less cost-sensitive than in consumer. Moving on, speaking about healthcare. Obviously, COVID has greatly accelerated what was already a growth in telemedicine, a market worth almost $280 billion by 2025.
If you're doing healthcare and medicine remotely, then it is quite obvious that the quality of the images you have, the ability to capture things and see detail in those and trust the quality of the images are extremely important. As is the being able to make cameras that are useful for the application you want to use them for. Small size, again, can be important. Even if you're not remote from the patient or where the camera's being used, robot-assisted surgery and traditional endoscopy are also areas that are a very good fit for our technologies. Just one example, in 2019, there were 18 million of just one type of endoscopic procedure taken in the U.S. alone. That's just one type in the U.S.
Endoscopy is something that we see as a good fit for scaling TLens down in size. On endoscopy, historically, these have been large systems from Japanese companies that have been autoclaved and cleaned after use. We're seeing a trend in the market for the endoscopy to move from that type of system, where the whole thing is cleaned and reused for another patient with the obvious implications for infection control and everything. The systems where the camera head, so the camera and the actual bit that's inserted is disposable, single use, so that's not cleaned, but it's instead just a separate part that can be separated from the rest of the system and disposed of. That's a good match for some of the features of our technology.
The small TLens has been able to make the cameras very small and fitting into those sorts of systems. Again, TLens can augment existing applications, and it can also enable entirely new ones. On the right-hand side of this slide here, we show a device from the Kavli Institute. Some of you may have seen some of this in some of the quarterly results that Øyvind's presented before or some of the press material. This basically is a brain scanning device that's mounted in rodents and monitors the brain and images the brain of the rodent as it moves around and does things like goes through mazes and other things.
For sure it's not high volume, but it's a good example of how TLens is enabling these technologies and applications that we think are important for our foothold in this market. Øyvind showed this slide earlier. I'll just show it again and as a summary. Of course, smartphone is, in terms of numbers and unit shifts, the highest volume market. I mentioned before, give or take, 1 to 1.5 billion phones per year, each with at least one camera on the front, an average of 3 on the back. 6 billion cameras. If we assume that we can take one of the front and one of the back, that's 3 billion piece opportunity for poLight in that market.
From the establishment of the EX30 projects, a very good foundation we're building out in that, in industrial machine vision applications. Augmented reality, we are very excited about. As I hope I conveyed in the slides earlier on, augmented reality, really, we think TLens is at the very sweet spot of the things we're trying to achieve are right at the sweet spot for what we're good at with TLens. All the challenges that the headset makers are trying to fix and the things they're trying to enable in the devices are all things that TLens is extremely well-suited for. Then there's other applications such as webcam and video conferencing, as well as the endoscopy and healthcare ones that I spoke about before.
In summary of what I've said, there's TLens as it is today, used in things like webcam, wearables, smartwatches, and machine vision. We're taking those TLenses as they are today and exploring new applications for them. I mentioned laser focusing, depth mapping through extrapolating depth information from focus, athermalization for both display optics and camera optics, and folded optics, which are the periscope-type cameras used for zoom cameras in the rears of phones. We're also taking that TLens as it is today and developing new markets for the TLens, exploring more in mobile, in healthcare, automation in both domestic and industrial environments, and AR and VR. The last line here is new products that we're considering developing or that we are within reach for us to develop. TLens is a focusing technology.
We could also, instead of focusing light, we can shift it for beam steering applications that can deliver OIS, optical image stabilization, in cameras. It can deliver super resolution for so-called wobulator type devices or anywhere else that a low power, small size, ultra high speed beam steering device would be valuable. That's really going to be the focus of Pierre's talk, and Pierre's going to give you much more detail on that. Thank you, everyone.
Thank you, Jon. That was good. Hopefully, you got it. It's not everything is easy to grasp, but by relooking at the webcast, I'm sure that we will get everything. Next up is our dear CTO. I was told not to say dear CTO, our fantastic CTO. Pierre Craen, he is more than 20 years experience in optomechanics system. Actually 12 of them in poLight. He's starting to be an inventor. He's from Belgium, but there is nothing wrong with that. He is extremely experienced. He has been working in other companies like Varioptic, today Corning, which is also a liquid tunable lens, and he found life easier in with TLens.
He has been with Barco, he has been with Motorola Symbol, doing actually designing optical system for barcodes. Some of the customers we have today is knowing Pierre from these days, he was designing barcode systems. Guess why we are in the barcode market. Some of the products Pierre designed is still in the market from on barcode side. Now what Pierre does, he do well. Pierre, welcome.
Thanks a lot, Øyvind, for the nice introduction. Before starting, I would like to bounce back on Jon's presentation. As you have seen, the world is really waiting for tunable optics to bring more applications. I felt from the beginning of my career that after designing a few optoelectronic devices, tunable optics was really something fantastic and so motivated to work on because I felt at that time that was something which was super important for the future. Still, I do feel that there are very bright future in front of us.
I would like to thank all of you for, because I'm not so often facing you, but I would like to thank you all for the support of poLight, because for me, it's really a fantastic opportunity to be part of that adventure. Thanks a lot again, and the future is ours, of course. Before going to the roadmap itself, I would like to go back to the competitive landscape because that's a nice way to position ourselves and to understand where we want to continue to push and develop and improve even more our future offering for the customers.
The competitive landscape for us is basically based on four major company and the left side are more like old technology, or at least easy-to-understand technology. The top left is the VCM, where you're moving the complete lens stack for making the focusing. You can move the complete lens stack, and then there are magnets and coils to move. That's a relatively mature technology. It has been used on many product before, and there are a few companies which has managed to do very well for developing such technology for the mobile market and the camera module.
You can see that those technologies from the picture are potentially very bulky also, and they're coming with limitations. That's why I believe that many smart people came with new ideas and particularly the SMA technology, which is based on a shape memory alloy, which is a kind of bistable material that you can change shape quickly by applying a pressure or it is thermally activated. Cambridge Mechatronics has been one of the companies which has developed and used the technology for the mobile industry. They have patented quite smart way to drive and to control and establish feedback loop on those solutions.
Again, that is a technology which is moving the entire lens stack with respect to the VCM. In a way, those technologies on the market, the VCMs are definitely the incumbent technology that we fighting and we need to displace one day. They are not tunable optics, but they are bringing adaptability to the system. The two other companies that are clearly in our area are tunable optics and the first one is Optotune. Optotune has developed a liquid lens technology, which is encapsulating liquids in a deformable enclosure.
One of the windows there is a membrane which is deformed by pushing the liquids in, by applying pressure on around the volume of liquid so that the liquid is pushing the membrane and creating a spherical deformation. Very often, not always, but Optotune has developed that technology based on VCM. In a way, that technology is also combining the benefits and the disadvantage of both. It's VCMs plus liquid technology. We have Corning Varioptic, that, as I've mentioned, I've been working with a few people in the R&D team, by the way, are working with us. They have developed a technology which is a liquid lens also, but slightly different.
It's based on electrowetting technology. This is the technology which is on the right side of the slide, bottom side. That technology is based on two liquids, which needs to have the same density, the different index of refraction, of course, to create that lensing effect, the focusing effect. But also one liquid is non-conductive, the other one is conductive. By applying the voltage to the electrodes in contact with the conductive liquids, it can change the contact angle. That's what we call wettability. The contact angle of the liquids with the electrodes, and by changing the voltage, you can change the shape of the liquid interface between the two.
Obviously the two liquids need to be unmixable, because you don't want to create mayonnaise or emulsion after a few uses of that. That's, of course, a technology which took some time also to mature, but they are there, and they are moving with a few customers. To give you a kind of nice overview of how we position ourselves compared to those technologies for what we believe are the key important parameters for the market that we are addressing. I will start from the bottom left with the gravity and power. Jon has been talking about that.
Obviously, the world is in motion now, so things needs to be non-sensitive to motion, to posture, and we believe that we are outperforming with that respect. Much better than the VCMs and the SMA, which are in black-gray color, and much more better than the other tunable optics, Optotune and Corning, because they are liquids. Liquids are also, because of the structure they have developed, relatively sensitive to gravity for different reasons, but they are sensitive. That's why we rated them a little bit with some less advantage than us and the VCMs and SMA. The field of view stability, a little bit related to the same thing.
On top of that, the fact that the TLens is so small, it enable us also to put the TLens very often, very close to the stop, optical stop of the system. That is giving you that nice feeling that when you do focusing, the image size doesn't change at all. That is something that Optotune and Corning could potentially do. It's less easy for them, but definitely for VCM and SMA, they cannot do that at all. Since they're moving the complete lens, the image size is changing and that is not a nice effect for the user, especially for video application.
In terms of module size, X, Y, Z, this is important. You will see that we are developing new ideas around the existing product, and even before we were adding some thickness to the camera module, for example, still in terms of X and Y size, we are much better than the other technology. Corning, Optotune, as you have seen previously, they are bulky. They build VCM coils around the optical aperture, and that is making things extremely bulky. In terms of compactness, we are way ahead also. Reliability, even though it has cost us a few years, that is still we feel much better than the others, especially when you look at the number of actuations that we can do.
We have demonstrated billions of cycles of autofocus where VCMs are barely reaching 100,000. That's where we feel that we are also ahead of them. In terms of speed, that's easy. We change speed of focus in a few milliseconds. All the others are in the range of 10, 15, 20, 30. Obviously, the liquid technology are extremely sensitive to temperature, so Corning will be super slow at low temperature. Optotune will be super slow at high temperature. Many different reasons to explain that, but definitely a speed issue for them. VCM, SMA, they can go fast, but then power consumption will start to be a problem for them.
Of course, they can move fast, but then you need to accelerate and brake super fast, and that is not always easy to do. Again, there we are, we feel outperforming and be better than the others. We're talking about a few milliwatt. Optotune, Corning. Corning, potentially a few tenths of milliwatt. Optotune, like VCMs, potentially even worse than VCM because they need to have even more stronger force to actuate, so they are very not as good as us, at least, in term of power consumption. Magnetism, again, nobody else than tunable optics can challenge us, so Corning is there.
Optotune, depending on the actuator, if they use VCMs, obviously they will be sensitive to magnetic interference with other devices, so that's not so advantageous. It's not an advantage for them, so for that. Stability over temperature. As we, as Jon mentioned earlier, when we use our TLens on a fixed lens, very often both are compensating each other. That's a nice effect. That's creating a relatively stable device over temperature, where liquids are obviously extremely sensitive to temperature. VCMs will suffer, not about their technology itself, but they will suffer from the fact that the lens, the fixed lens is sensitive to temperature, so they are a bit less stable than us.
From the image quality point of view, we must admit that VCMs and SMA are better than ours because they don't bring one more optical component on top of the system. Still, we have some hope that we will get back to them. Even though we have rated power a little bit lower than the VCMs, you will see that there are potential ways to go back there. Obviously, Corning, Optotune, the technology is relatively difficult to secure good optical quality because we're talking about nanometer of quality of surface when you're deforming and that's relatively difficult for them to secure that over the operating temperature. By design and by technology, they are limited there.
The last one, where we are behind the other tunable optics technology is the aperture size and focusing range. Obviously, so far we are coming a little bit short, and that's why you have seen on one application that people are stacking TLens. That's one way to get more optical power and focusing range. It's not always possible. Compared to VCMs and the other tunable optics, we are a little bit behind that. This is really important to realize that, and that's where we will and we are putting effort to try to compensate and find solution to improve on that.
This being said, there are many other companies which are working on tunable optics also, but most of them are basically working on the same technology. It's all of them are using liquid lens technology. The only one which is slightly different, which is still a liquid, which is a liquid crystal technology, is LensVector. They have tried to penetrate the mobile market a long time ago with no success because the technology was not good enough to create a nice image quality and that has been in a way not the way to go to follow the trend of the mobile and the high resolution camera for the mobile so for the mobile market.
Still nice technology, but coming with extremely bad performance for imaging application at least. They have reinvent themselves for going to other technology. But in a way, nothing different than that. I want to say also that Tristan, the other business VP in the US, is coming from LensVector, so we are quite well, I would say, equipped to understand the technology of the others and try to adapt our offer with respect to that. Before going to the roadmap, just a quick status on IP. This is evolving every quarter, I would say.
We own 70 worldwide granted patent families, so of course it's much more patents than that. You can see on the right side the coverage of our IP on the globe. The size of the bubble is basically representing the number of patents that we have, and we're trying to of course cover most of the market that we are addressing, and a little bit more to try to make sure that in the future, you never know, we are well-covered for emerging countries also. We have nine pending applications because we have tried to improve and continue to invent new solutions. That's why every quarter, potentially one of those nine pending applications will become a granted application, and we have three registered trademarks.
We believe, and I believe, that poLight is very well-protected by the key patents. The important patents are still valid for minimum 10 years, so we are good. In addition of course, we are continuing to try to improve on that, and we have a strategy in the company to really secure the freedom to operate for poLight, but also for customer. Of course we want to really avoid a copycat of our technology or copy of our technology. This strategy is based on three legs, even though it's not nice to walk on three legs. Still, we are continuing to invent new things, and we patenting every time we have a key feature that we believe will be key for the future application or even for the current autofocus application.
We're filing those applications for grants, of course. The other one is a trade secret. There are many, many, many things that we want to keep secret, and there are many, many things, details, especially on the process, that we keep secret and we will not open to anybody. Because one thing that we need to keep in mind that filing for an IP, a patent, is of course opening the know-how to others. We are protected, but still we are opening to the rest of the world. Then the third one is the defensive application that we call, so which is basically all the ideas that we feel could potentially generate some smart idea, but still with low level of patentability.
We do publications, we go to conferences, we participate in scientific papers or books and things like that to disclose those ideas so that we're creating the prior art so that people cannot start to patent it and that's a way to secure the freedom to operate for us and for our customer. The roadmap for the AF technology. As you know, the technology is based conceptually on a very simple approach, where you put the soft polymer, soft optical material in between two pieces of optical component.
One is flexible with actuators, and by applying voltage, the piezo is contracting and bending the membrane, and that's creating the optical effect. One of our focus for the past year and still ongoing today, and that's why we are getting more competence and experience in the team is to work around the existing products by, we call design in. We designing a lot of lens designs so that we can use our current products to generate a multiple of different solution for the customer. There are many designs that we have promoted a long time ago, sometimes with good success. We continue to do that because we feel that it's a very nice way to optimize the solution.
We are also proposing a stack, a TLens stack solution to increase the focusing range to compensate a little bit the lack of focusing activity. We are obviously also aware of the need to improve the pure optical performance of the device. The antireflective coating is one aspect of it, especially on the membrane side. This is something that if we want to go for the high-end optical application, this is really something that we need to implement, and we are working on that. We are working on a curved back window.
That has been always there, and that will become even more important for the Add-In design because it's opening again for more flexibility, more degree of freedom to optimize the lens stack or the device, in a better manner. Or use lower number, reduce the small nose, the nose of the camera, or optimize one performance of the camera. Another old idea which become more and more real is to implement, for example, wavelengths filtering in the TLens. That is something which is a little bit kind of revolution in the camera module world because that IR filter which is sitting on the sensor, people has built their process with that to protect the sensor against dust and everything.
Removing that IR filter and moving it on the TLens is shaking a little bit the ecosystem. It may take time to come, but it's definitely a way to make a more compact solution for some application. Obviously, the actuator is key and we're working with our partner to start to work with new material, with new processes that will help us to improve the strength to bend more. But there are also potentially other type of actuators that we could use. Bulk piezo is one way to go. SMA potentially one day also.
We are not closing the door for those, and we will take the best actuator possible when needed to create the right product for the market. That's a little bit of one of my dreams somehow. Today the MEMS process that we're using is imposing to go for relatively flat deformable membrane, and obviously this is coming with some limitation. We do feel that things are coming, and we have realized recently also that pre-shaped membrane could be within reach in the coming years. And that is, of course, requiring a lot of development and also from the actuator point of view.
There are signs to indicate that is becoming more and more possible, and meaning that we will be able to create a lens which is not like a window with no optical power, but a lens which could potentially replace the first lens of the lens stack, which will basically remove one component. We're gonna go straight on the lens stack and start to really provide a tunable lens with a lot of optical power and potentially some asphericity, and all those degree of freedom that people needs to go to take into account to make a high megapixel solution, high resolution camera. Okay. Activity on the membrane, super important for us and obviously the optical material.
Still on the roadmap, we need to continue to create more polymer, new solution. We need to create more tunable optical material to optimize many different aspects and to adapt to the market and the application that we want to go for. Response time, index of refraction, maybe dispersion of the material could be important when we start to be more integrated in the lens stack. In terms of roadmap, simplified roadmap here, we have the current product that we will continue to evolve by applying better coating, potentially changing the back window with an IR-cut filter, or a real back window, a plastic back window to be more integrated in the system.
That's definitely part of the short-term activity and development that we're doing. The Platinum, which will offer a bigger aperture, and still we don't know what will be the biggest aperture that we can go for. We are reassessing now with the new material that our partner has developed in the process to see how big we could go. That will definitely be a product to address the bigger format sensor up to half an inch, and definitely give us more opportunity to penetrate the back cam, for example, for the mobile application. I'm sure that industrial application will benefit a lot from using bigger aperture because there are big sensor, there are big cameras everywhere, and today we have some issues. We weren't so good to address those type of market.
Smaller TLens for us is very natural to go much smaller. That's something that we have put on the roadmap. We say very often that we're gonna be extremely opportunistic. I don't know which one will come first. We will stay very attuned to the market and the opportunity. We will push the one that we feel and we believe is the best opportunity for poLight. The right side of the slide is basically illustrating a little bit what I was mentioning. The next evolution of our product will be a pre-shaped membrane with some actuator.
This is the top one single pre-shaped lens top right with combined with a fixed lens. That will be a real lens, the tunable lens that potentially can start to be used in the lens stack, and taking part of the lens stack really, not like a window as the current TLens. You will see the benefits of it in the next slide. Of course, the ultimate solution would be that both interface will be deformable, and that will give us more focusing capability. Obviously, if we can make both pre-shaped, that would be a fantastic achievement.
In terms of impact on the camera module, and that's very mobile oriented, but obviously we can address that to for many other types of optical device. The concept is there. Today we have a few products on the market with Add-In. Basically we take the TLens on top of the camera module, as indicated on the right top side of the slide. We have done a few POCs now, after a few years of creating momentum in the market and working with partners, we have generated a super compact camera modules with the TLens in. You see the TLens in blue on the left side in between the lens stack.
Obviously, to do such kind of things, the TLens needs to have some extremely tight optomechanical tolerance, which not all technology can achieve really. The other tunable optics will have hard time to reach what needs to be done there for keeping the right optical quality. By burying the TLens into the lens stack, we have been able to generate a very small no-see camera. High megapixel, so it's a 64-megapixel frame. You will see one example of that camera. Obviously, you need to believe us because the TLens is inside, so you don't see anything except the two electrodes which are coming from the middle of the stack.
There are designs which has proven that if we can implement a lens instead of the back window, which is flat today, it will even further improve the compactness of the camera. If we want to use that degree of freedom to optimize the thickness. Still the TLens will be in between lens, but adding a curved back window in the TLens existing product will open for more opportunity and a higher performance solution. The next step of course, here you see the third coming, starting from the left, is what I call the pre-shaped membrane, which will take place, for example, replace the first lens.
The first lens of the lens stack is the one where you have the most optical power, and that's where usually you want to make the focusing to make it very efficient. That is potentially a way to affect less the image quality because we don't add one component, we're just replacing one existing one. Of course, that component will have to be super good and super high quality, but that is possible. Of course, the next one could also be that we go for two pre-shaped and then we have a camera which could be even more optimized.
That is the roadmap for the dual autofocus and the impact on the potential evolution of the camera module here for the mobile. Of course, sorry, all those camera modules could benefit from putting the IR cut filter which is in front of the sensor on the bottom here to reduce even further the. Move the IR filter in the TLens. That can be used for whatever product. Of course, those concepts can be developed for any TLens that we're gonna come with. Platinum, Silver Premium. I would say the natural move next is to start to do something else than focusing with our technology.
We have a polymer, we have actuator, we have optical component, and if you start to actuate, for example, the glass support with two actuators, you could start to use OIS. That's again not new or at least you can do not OIS, but beam steering. The concept is not new. We have done POCs in the past, and we have done new POCs also recently. Definitely possible. So that's what we are continuing to develop. You don't need to, I would say, combine or to focus with the tilting which is represented on the left side. Still just by using the tilting and the optical wedge, tunable optical wedge, you can create some OIS, optical image stabilization.
You could also do some beam steering and also some improve some resolution, as Jon has mentioned, previously. There are things that we can do. Last but not least, the dream of many optical engineer is to do optical zoom with tunable optics. No moving parts inside. Many people tried to push that for the mobile, but no success so far. We still believe that by making our technology evolving correctly, we could offer some solution for that. The pre-shape and double pre-shape will probably be one of those important feature to enable those type of application. Of course, for that, we still need to improve piezo actuation.
We need potentially to find also some lead-free piezo actuator in the future. This is becoming more and more real. Potentially not in a thin film PZT, but bulk piezo material with no lead are coming. So we are also investigating and scrutinizing those technology which are coming. Different way of depositing those piezo material also key important for us to enable new architecture of products. Obviously, the optical material that we're gonna use may need to be optimized in a very different manner. Stiffness, again, speed, for OIS and other application will have to be tuned in a slightly different manner.
One of the product that we are working on today is, and let me go back one step, the optical wedge, which is basically shifting the beam that we can use for improved resolution for AR sensor solution, but also for AR display, as Jon has mentioned before. The idea is to shift by half a pixel in all directions, so that you can generate, at the end of the day, a higher resolution with a low resolution display or low resolution sensor. This is again not very new. This is something that scientists and engineers has been developing for many years.
We believe here that we have a nice opportunity to provide super compact solution for those AR/VR application or other industrial application. That's something that we are working on actively. Obviously for AR/VR also, it seems that OIS and AF are sometimes very welcome for the camera system or the sensor system because they don't like to call it a camera for image application. For sensing, combining OIS and autofocus in one component and then make that one inside the camera module, like adding a solution would be a perfect solution in terms of compactness and functionality. This is something that we have been working on in the past.
We have proven that it is possible to do, and we'll continue to work on the technology bricks to make it real in the future. Old dream, I would say, for optical engineers. That's a picture that I've taken from an article from 2007, which has been made by Philips because at that time, Philips was working on the liquid technology also. Obviously again, many attempts with no success so far. Definitely if we could bring system or lens system and lens component with high optical power and some tunability, you could make a lot of nice solution with no moving parts. You need at least two.
Very often you need more than that. By working on double pre-shaped lens, for example, tunable lens, that could be already two components in a way, that will potentially enable those very nice designs for making zooms with no moving parts. Here we are. Thanks a lot.
Excellent, Pierre. Thank you. If you don't need a break after that, you never need a break. I suggest that we take a 10 minutes break. That means 25. You in the audience here, be welcome to take a drink or some fruit or biscuit or whatever. From you guys sitting in the office or home, do the same, and be sure to be back in 10 minutes. See you soon. Okay.
Welcome back from the short break, which we definitely needed. Next up is going through the operation setup. This is gonna be done by Marianne Sandal, Chief Operating Officer. Marianne has been in poLight for six years now, and has been chasing me for 20.
We worked together in Nera Networks in Bergen for 5 years, and Marianne for 18 years. I moved to Q-Free and was managing CEO there for nearly 8 years, and I needed somebody to clean up after me, so I brought Marianne to Q-Free. She was there for 10 years, I think. I had the same feeling when I went to poLight. I needed somebody to hold my hand, so Marianne has now been in poLight for 6 years. Very strong operational background internationally and bachelor in mechanical engineering and also some management school in addition. Marianne, the floor is yours. Enjoy the audience.
Thank you very much, Øyvind. It's a pleasure for me to give you a short introduction to the poLight operational setup. poLight, as you might know, is a fabless company. Except for the polymer that we do in-house, the rest we use manufacturing partners. We have built a worldwide operation. Totally 50 of our employees today are working in the operation area. In addition, we have our manufacturing partners. Here at headquarters, we do the manufacturing of the polymer. We also have a very advanced lab, and we'll be pleased to invite the one present here today to have a look after the presentations. We also do sample deliveries, small scale from here. Higher volume, usually later in the evaluation phase, we deliver from the assembly line. We also have prepared some system delivery, small scale from here. Typical is the health and the medical customers.
We have product, data management, manufacturing technology, head of quality, and the third line support based here. When we are building organization, it's important for us to be close to the customer and close to our manufacturing partners. In Tampere, Finland, we have head of test management. In Italy, Milan, we get the MEMS wafer supplied. In the Philippines, we have our mass production assembly line, and we also have testing under establishment. In Taiwan, we have head of supply chain management, product testing. We have a very experienced team of poLight employees doing testing. We do customer support, quality, and we also have a second source assembly. In China, we do customer support, both pre and after sales, and quality. The majority of our deliveries we will do through distributor. We are heavily involved with the OEM, with the camera module makers before getting the order.
When the PO contract is ready to go, we prefer to use distributor to supply the material, also to have an advantage on the cash flow. We was ISO 9001 certified since 2017. Manufacturing capacity. We split between what we call installed capacity and material. Installed capacity is about machine, equipment, and trained personnel. Today, we're targeting to have an installed capacity of about 1.5 million TLens per month. When it comes to material, we follow the situation carefully. We prepare forecasts, and we act accordingly. The TLens and the supply chain. Pierre, you described the technology looking at the left-hand corner. The TLens is constructed around the piezo element. You have the piezo pin, thin glass membrane, then you have another high-quality glass, and you have the polymer as a sandwich in between.
Around this technology today in mass production, we have, as you said, the TLens Silver and the TLens Silver Premium. The difference between the two is the aperture size. We and typical is the optical specification of the customer deciding which lens to go. We deliver what we call the bare TLens, and we deliver packaged TLens. The packaged TLens is to ease the integration for the camera module maker. The bare is more for the compact optical design, typical the Add-In design. If you look below, you will see the main elements of our supply chain. It's the glass, the polymer, the MEMS wafers, assembly, and test. The glass, high-quality glass is handled by the manufacturing partner. However, on the specification of poLight. The polymer, again, we ship to manufacturing partner. The MEMS wafers are being shipped to the assembly partner and then assembled and tested.
We typically deliver to the camera module makers, and then deliver to the OEMs. The polymer. The polymer came from Russia in the late 1990s. Together with SINTEF, it was developed into a stable silicone gel. Ignis Telecom, Ignis Display, together with SINTEF, saw the tunable lens material opportunity in this. In 2006, they filed the basic patent. In 2008, Ignis changed name to poLight. The poLight TLens requires a polymer that is super soft with high optical power range, reliable, compatible with the high speed of the TLens. We have been optimizing around these parameters during the last 10 years plus. Today we do it here, and we ship to the manufacturing partners. We will do 100% testing of all critical parameters before we ship. Easy to scale.
We are well prepared. One liter of polymer equals to about one million TLenses, so we are prepared. We keep buffer stock at the assembly partner. Also very convenient as the shelf lifetime of the polymer is long. As Pierre said, we have all the competence around the polymer in-house, implying we can do fine-tuning to adapt to different customer needs. We can work on the viscosity, on the stiffness, on the response time, curing, et cetera. Also, the MEMS wafer has had some history. I believe people working with the MEMS technology know the complexity of taking it into mass production in the larger fabs. poLight has worked with various fabs during the development phases. In 2013, we signed up with STMicroelectronics in Milano, and together we worked on developing the optical MEMS actuator that is in mass production today.
Core technology being piezo material, glass membrane, stress compensation, and environmental protection. The setup we have today is well prepared and suited for high volume operation. Today, we also have detailed plans in place together with ST how to do further ramp up. The tech environment at ST together with Pierre's team are continuously working on improvements and future-proofing of the technology. Meetings are taking place. Next week, the tech teams will meet in Agrate. Lead time of the MEMS wafers is the longest in our supply chain, and particularly during the last couple of years, the lead time of the MEMS wafer has been long, and we had to take actions. However, looking ahead, we foresee that the lead time will normalize. We also used quite some time to find the right assembly partner for poLight and the tunable lens.
That is a very sensitive lens, as expressed by Pierre. In addition to precise pick and place suited for high volume, low cost, also optical quality has been an important factor when finding the right partner. The dispensing of the polymer and the glue also in a small quantity, high precision, high speed, has also been important. We sign up with TAI, or also called Chong Sing, in 2013. We worked together with them in Taiwan at their headquarters in Taipei, setting up our line. Last year, we moved this line to the Philippines.
The reason is that the site in the Philippines is better suited for high volume, low cost. The line we today have is a fully automated line. We also have taken the effort of qualifying a second source assembly partner. This one is in Taiwan. The reason, of course, being prepared for further ramp up and volumes, but we also see that some of our customer demanding that we have a dual source of some of our processes. The product test of TLens is very important for us. Today, the product test system do optical characterization and defect detection. The equipment we use is very complex equipment that we have designed ourselves together with the equipment partner, and then we consign to the assembly partners.
We do 100% testing of each TLens, and all test data are transferred to the poLight database for careful evaluation and analysis. We have full traceability of each individual part through the entire supply chain. That implies that each of the TLenses being supplied to the customer can be traced back to the full supply chain from the MEMS they prefer, the assembly part, and the test. Yeah.
PoLight, leader in tunable optics technology, provider of the TLens, lightning-fast autofocus solutions for mobile, consumer, barcode, augmented reality, and many other markets. In this video, we are going to take a closer look at how the TLens is manufactured and assembled. Starting with the bare TLens, followed by the packaged TLens, an Add-In solution for customer integration. We will also give a brief introduction to final test at the end of the video.
To understand the manufacturing process of the T-Lens, we need to first break down the main components. There are several T-Lens product types depending on the customer need, but they all share the same build-up. Unlike the complex competitive technologies such as VCM, the T-Lens can be made with only three components: glass, optical gel, and MEMS wafer. Each part with a dedicated process flow. Let's begin with the glass processing. Glass processing starts with a big glass panel thinner than a normal piece of paper. In the world of optics, keeping all parts clean is extremely important. That is why the glass must be thoroughly cleaned before further processing to meet the tight specifications of poLight. All panels are carefully placed in a special holder to prevent movement during the cleaning process. One holder can fit glass for tens of thousands of T-Lenses.
The cleaning process is a fully automatic system and will ensure all the quality requirements are met. To prepare the big glass to be cut into smaller pieces of glass, each glass panel is mounted to a tape on a metal ring. This ring is then fed into a dicing machine. This machine is a fully automatic system and will cut the glass panel first in horizontal direction, then cut vertical direction with high accuracy, speed, and precision. The result is smaller singulated quadrants of glass known as glass die or glass units. When the dicing is complete, the panels are carefully inspected and measured for quality assurance by automatic equipment to make sure they meet the high-quality standards of poLight. The actual build-up of a TLens is done on a metal frame, usually referred to as a strip or a boat.
Each strip marked with a unique code used by the machines to keep full traceability throughout the entire manufacturing process. To put the glass die on the frame, both frame and glass panel is loaded into an automatic die bonding machine. The machine carefully picks the glass and places it on strip in a fixed matrix with very high speed and precision. When the matrix is complete, the machine will put the strip into a dedicated magazine. As you can see, the glass dies are now spread out on the frame, and this completes the glass processing. The first processing step is now complete. It's time to look at the second step, optical gel processing. The gel is a patented polymer developed and manufactured at poLight headquarters in Norway. It's provided as a two-component material in a dual syringe for the most possible convenient handling.
The two components are mixed using a dispensing gun and a mixing tip and has a clear, transparent liquid form as demonstrated here. The optical gel is not only a key optical component, it's also designed to be the very glue to keep the glass and the MEMS together, as you will see in the third and final process flow of the TLens. Before we continue processing the optical gel, we need to prepare the third and final component of the TLens, the MEMS wafer. The reason for this is because the optical gel and the MEMS wafer will be processed together in the final step. The very heart of the TLens is a piezo element that originates from an 8-inch silicon MEMS wafer. Similar to the glass processing, the wafer is mounted to tape and metal ring, prepared for dicing.
Once again, a fully automatic process will ensure each MEMS die is singulated with micron precision. After dicing, the wafers are carefully inspected and measured by fully automated equipment to ensure the best possible quality assurance. The wafer with singulated piezo MEMS actuators is now ready to be combined with the glass and optical gel. All components are now loaded into the same bonding machine. The polymer is ready to be dispensed on top of the glass units. A frame with glass units are transported to the dispensing area, and the optical gel is dispensed on top of the glass. When all glass is filled up with optical gel, the frame is moved to the second position, the bonding area, where the diced MEMS units are placed on top of the polymer and glass. This means the polymer is now sandwiched between the glass and the MEMS.
Let's slow down the machine to see what's going on. Notice how the autofocus in the camera cannot keep up with the machine speed. If only we had a TLens inside. Thousands of TLenses are ready for curing, making the optical gel move from a liquid state to a solid state. After curing, the TLens is complete and ready for final test. This concludes the bare TLens assembly. Before final test, let's take a quick overview of the packaged TLens, a solution for easy integration for camera module vendors. The package is two additional components to the bare TLens. The first is a small plastic frame with metal pins called the package, making electrical connection from all sides possible. The package is bonded in the same way as the MEMS, surrounding the TLens. The package is glued to the TLens on all four sides.
To ensure electrical connection between the package and the TLens, wire bonding is used for the best industry standard connectivity. The final component is an extremely thin optical black part that goes on the backside of the packaged TLens. Therefore, the complete stack of TLens and package is picked from the frame and placed on top of this new component. This concludes the packaged TLens manufacturing. The parts are now ready for final test. poLight is testing 100% of all parts. After the material is loaded into the machine, each part is picked up to a rotating table. Each position in the table is a dedicated test. Optical and electrical testing. Top side inspection. Bottom side inspection. Results from each test can be seen on screen in real time. Based on the results of the test, the material will be placed in different output area.
This concludes the final test. Parts are now transferred to plastic trays ready for packing and shipping to customer. Thank you for watching.
The last year, poLight have worked closely with several well-recognized customer demanding the utmost quality and reliability. The result of this is that the TLenses we are manufacturing today has the best quality ever, and our supply chain is well prepared for the various ramp-up scenarios. Going forward, for sure, we will continue to work on yield improvement and cost optimization, continuous improvement on the products and the manufacturing processes, future-proofing the technology, and carefully evaluating the required capacity and material needed to supply to existing and new customers. Thank you.
Thank you, Marianne. Thank you, Ole, for the nice video. Q&A, will my team please join me? We potentially have some question.
Just the one.
Just the one, yes. Okay. We can start maybe then with questions from the audience. I may let them answer or not.
Yes.
That will be in my control. Any questions?
You say you are not producing for stock now, but when you are making better money and have more money in the bank, will you then have another ramp up?
I will just repeat that question since the webcast participants can get the question clear. The question was, you're today not producing for stock, but will that happen later when you have more-
Cash.
-cash?
Yeah.
Marianne, do you want to answer that?
Yeah. Of course, that's more for you and the guys.
No, but actually we do produce some for stock. We do. We try to minimize this of course.
There are different parts of the value chain. As Marianne talked about, wafers. We need to be prepared to have wafers in stock. We would wait as long as possible before we make them into small pieces, then it's handed into complete TLens. Because we want to minimize the capital we spend on stock. Wafers, as an example, is something we have to buffer. It's 1 year ago or plus, we were kind of forced, due to the supply chain situation in the world, to put a PO on our wafer supply vendor, to say that whatever you need the next kind of 1.5 year, you need to order now. That could also be allocated capacity.
We have to do it, and we did, and luckily. We just keep it in stock as a wafer. We don't produce final TLenses before we have to. That is the strategy. I think that as we get running with more kind of products, we would potentially have also a buffer stock, more buffer stock on final sample TLenses. You would like to minimize that. Yeah. Any more questions? Yes.
Yeah. I noticed on O-Film that the yield noted on the line there was zero. Have you improved zero or it seems to?
The yield of the manufacturing is not zero for sure. We have come very, very far. Particularly during the last year, we have come very close to our target. No doubt, we need to work on the fine-tuning, continuing, improving more. Of course, as I also said, continuing to reduce the cost of the TLens. No doubt, we have come very far when it comes to the quality and the robustness of the TLens. The yield is good.
I think on the video, it was actually rejects that was zero, not yield.
Yeah.
That column.
Oh.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yes, that column was rejects.
Yeah.
Rejects, yes.
Yeah.
Yeah. Okay. Any more questions? Yes, please.
Yeah. Yeah. Any other markets you have been contacted by?
Mm.
Want to use the TLens that we don't know about yet?
Yeah.
Are there any-
Other applications.
You don't have to tell us, but are there any?
The question is, are there any new markets which you can see coming to using TLens? I think that a relatively recent example, I would say, is the medical space.
Mm-hmm.
Where we had nothing, not so many quarters ago, where we now have quite some significant activity ongoing. That's kind of one example, and that's related to kind of endoscopes, and more scientific equipment, like the Kavli use. I think the short answer to your question is, I'm sure. The medical space is a relatively recent example which we didn't see. You can say also, automotive for car industry. We think that is potential for us going forward. We are not using a lot of time and effort today on that market, but we can see it coming. You know, the cars, self-driving cars, also monitoring inside the car, the behavior of the driver, the behavior of the passenger.
There are many, many types of applications there. Yes. I would like to say that it's a relatively small team. From my 20+ experience of managing tech companies, one of the difficult things to do is to kind of make sure that these guys, not Marianne, because she's very, but these guys needs to be kind of also controlled and managed because they want to do everything. That is the recipe for disaster. We have to kind of concentrate on what we think is the near-term success factors. That's why we cannot take all incoming calls and jump on that. That was a long answer, but the answer is yes.
Okay.
Any other questions?
Yeah. I'd like to jump back to Pierre's slide about the competitive landscape and the relative performance, where TLens seems to outperform the other technologies on reliability. Does the drop test fall under this point so that we can understand that, like, the TLens is as good as all the other technologies on the drop test?
Yeah. Let me repeat that question. The slide of CTO Pierre was showing kind of a relative benchmark of poLight towards other technologies. On the reliability, poLight scored good. The question was that, does that include drop tests? Pierre, do you feel-
Yes, yes, it is including drop tests. The other technologies have also issues with drop tests. This is a tough evolving target, by the way, because the evolution of the phones are always getting thinner.
You know, stiffer, more weight and everything. Yes, we are at that level now.
I just want to support Pierre, and that is, I think, reliability and maybe particular drop test is something which will be haunting us from now to forever.
Mm-hmm.
For the reason Pierre has mentioned. Because specs changes, today they're dropping it at 1.5 meters, tomorrow maybe 2 meters. We need to continuously work on robustifying our solution to be able to follow all these kind of new demands. As of today, as I said in my Q1 report, even though we didn't like the commercial progress during that quarter, the technical progress in particular related to Axera has been extremely impressive.
Mm-hmm.
Yes.
Mm-hmm.
Some of the new technologies that you are working on, has that come about via a request from a specific application or a specific vertical like AR or like smartphone, like the pixel shifting and the wedging? Is it a request from your customers or?
The question is it some of the new technologies, unlike the pixel-enhanced resolution shifting pixels, whether that is an incoming demand or whether it's something we are the technology looking for application. Was that the question?
Yeah.
The answer to that is actually yes. It is an incoming request, but we were not fully kind of surprised. There is a clear customer request and demand for that kind of applications.
From a specific vertical or a specific.
I would say in two verticals. Both the fundamental technology for super resolution for smartphone related application.
Yeah.
Also for, AR type relevant display. More questions? Rika.
Yes. Smartphone is probably planned for 2023 maybe.
Mm-hmm.
Can you say something about the timeline for the OEMs in the smartphone industry? When will there be a PO, for example? How many months before delivery from this PO?
The answer is that smartphone business for poLight, maybe 2023, which was kind of communicated in Q1 reports. The question from Rika is when will it be then, if that's the case, when will it be a PO for such a release on poLight? Is that the question? Yes. First of all, we have relatively frequent POs from that market. But that are more related to qualification processes. When it comes to a real case, this is a demanding market.
Because the OEMs, they do expect, even if you're small, even if you're a new player, even if you're representing a new technology, they expect you to be ready based on them saying, "We expect to be releasing, and we expect to be having this demand." That's just the expectation that the market has. Then you can like it or dislike it, but that's the fact. That's why we needed kind of to take that decision to buy that material to be ready in, say, 12 weeks to ship to them. They maybe would like to only give us a 10-12 weeks kind of lead time, you know. That's how that industry works. It's super tough, but that's the mechanism there. Yes, Rika.
If everything technical is in order for camera modules.
Sorry, can you repeat that again?
If everything is in order in the technical manner for the manufacturers.
Oh, yeah. The question is that in a way, from a technical perspective, if the camera module guys are ready with TLens solution, is that the question, Rika?
Yeah.
Yes. When it comes to, as I said in the Q1 report, the progress we have had, I would say the last year, and the progress we had the last, say, couple of quarters, has been extremely good. We have dedicated a lot of resources in the company in all parts of the value chain. We see that our camera module suppliers ready to take commitment. We see camera module suppliers pushing to get the first design win with this technology. The readiness is there. Does that mean that it will be no hiccups in the first release? No.
There will be hiccups and they know that. The readiness is quite mature. Yeah.
Uh, good enough is-
Sorry. Excuse me.
There are some worse used before good enough. The VCM is good enough.
Yes. Yes.
We have this PDAF. Taking account that the sensors are getting bigger, the PDAF is getting more efficient. Is there a meeting point with the PDAF and sensor size and format?
Jon, will you repeat that question? Yes.
Correct me if I'm wrong, I think you're asking about the impact of PDAF, which is Phase Detection AutoFocus, and increased sensor size. Is that correct?
Yeah.
Yeah.
With the needs, you know, quality will need.
I mean, I don't think they're necessarily separate. So very many of the cameras that we are working with just now, the camera modules that we developed are already PDAF. When we go downstairs, we'll show you some camera modules, the majority of which already are PDAF. I don't think it's a coming together in the future. I think it's something that already exists.
There are no competition. I see the cameras now, they stay out of focus with a small camera that uses PDAF.
The PDAF is a sensor technology, something that happens in the image sensor.
Mm-hmm.
That needs to be paired with a fast actuator. The ones that historically you might be referring to are paired with fast VCMs, which have closed loop in them, so they have a magnetic feedback system that's used to compensate for the positional dependencies and the ringing and all the other horrible things that happen in VCMs. It can equally well be paired with any other fast actuator such as TLens®.
Yeah.
I think it's something that enhances the benefits of a TLens® rather than a competitive threat.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
We still have more time for questions. Maybe you're waiting to ask the question until you get outside and eat some sushi, huh? Okay. Jon, there are a few questions.
Yep. There is.
On the web. Can we put on your optical power and?
I will do. Yep. Okay. First question. Is Dr. Isaksen can ensure that a design win in the phone will happen no matter what the horizon? A lot of things have been said, mainstream solution, et cetera, yet the smartphone has been delayed time after time.
You know, we are working every day, every night, every weekend, the big team, to try to convince that TLens® will be part of the smartphone business. We wouldn't have energy to do that if we didn't believe. Can I guarantee? Of course not. Cannot guarantee. If you look at the maturity, if you look at the performance we are able to do, if you look at the reference we are building, I can't see why not.
Next question. Is poLight an important partner to STMicro?
Absolutely. STMicro, one of our key customer in the thin film technology is this particular product. Absolutely.
Final question just now online. On the slide about competitive landscape, Pierre talked a little bit about VCM and SMA being ahead of TLens® in terms of image quality. How significant is this difference in performance as of today, and does it apply to all applications?
Pierre Craen.
Yes. I would say that it's more like a lab issue. Of course, many people are testing mobile phone on benchmarking in the labs and everything. Which potentially they will see some difference. Still there, when you combine everything, the wobbling of the VCMs and when you take everything in real life, the difference in image quality is basically not visible. Obviously, if you add a window in front of a system, you are affecting the image quality because the window needs to be the right quality. The TLens® needs to be the right quality. At the end of the day, there is no real difference there.
There is another dimension to that question, which is the fact that the tunable optics, all of them are coming with some field curvature, which is degrading the image quality in the corner. That is true for all. Again, comparing with other limitation from VCMs, where the tilting and the creating also defocusing on the edge of the image, that is, you would say, side by side. Using our technology with the speed and using like all-in-focus technology, we're gonna wipe down all those minor quality issue on the image.
That will become like a fantastic image quality if people want to take that opportunity, if they feel they need to. I don't think that we are behind too much of VCM. On paper, in the lab, benchmarking, they could see the differences.
Mm-hmm. Okay.
A follow-up question here.
Mm-hmm.
What is the biggest issue with having larger apertures for back camera? Will voltage levels increase?
Pierre?
This is one way to get more focusing range, but we are relatively high already. Then what we're planning to do is to try to look for material which are stronger. Going to bigger aperture is not only an issue of actuation, but it's also an issue of optical quality. Very quickly, it doesn't go linearly with the size of the optics, but it's going with the square or even more. That is a challenge to really secure the right optical quality.
It's not only an issue of actuation, but it's also an issue of optical quality, and we need to continue to improve gradually our processes and supply chain to reach the right level of quality. The little story behind that is that at the very early stage, we were working with Bronze, very small, and we had no issue at all with quality. With our current product, we had to improve a lot the supply chain to secure the performance on the pure optical quality of the component that we are using. Going one step behind will improve again the challenge to reach the right level.
Hmm.
That's optics. You know the big telescope? People are taking months and months to polish it, and that's very difficult.
For getting to the right qualities. Bigger is always more difficult for everybody.
One more question from the audience.
Yes, sir. The big glasses you grabbed a patent for, is that doing? Are you doing anything with that one now?
The question is that we have a patent from big glasses.
The spectacles.
The spectacles, you mean? Yeah.
The reading glasses.
Yeah. Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, we have a.
What's happening with that one?
That one, we parked that a little bit on the side because big aperture, but we have been using the concept to develop POCs of bigger TLens.
That concept is under, I would say, development or trials so far. Mm-hmm. Yes.
Do you have any more surprises coming or?
Yeah. There are image quality, optical quality issues, and then it's also. We feel that going into that direction is quite difficult because the way the human eye is.
I guess he was referring if you have new kind of application suppliers.
Supplies. Yes, yes.
Yes, I'm sure there will be more.
Yeah, yeah, they will come. Yeah.
No worry, Pierre. Okay.
We have another follow-up question from Oscar. Can we be sure that all parts of the logistics chain will keep up with the future ramp up? Smartphone, AR, VR, barcode. This will increase a lot towards 2025 if everything goes well.
Mm.
How will the production keep up? Mainstream solution will require quite a few TLens.
Yes. It's a very good question, and it's of course a great concern for Marianne Sandal. That's why we have to take all the pain by being ahead of the real needs. We need to kind of take some bets basically with the material stream. I think it's fair to say as a general statement, today, every company I would expect has a huge challenge with managing the supply chain. It is really difficult. My understanding, that will probably normalize. It will probably normalize, but there's nothing in the market today showing any signs of normalization. That will happen, of course. Saying that we will not have a problem to ramp will be a lie.
I think there will be a lot of problems. What we need to be trying to do is to understand the needs in the market, in the different verticals as soon as possible, and have the financial strength to take the commitment on the long lead items. That's the way we have to handle it.
No more questions from the online participants.
How are we doing timing-wise? 3:16 P.M. The demo starts in 15 minutes. Okay. Colleagues, thank you for your help. You can bring the computer to the CFO, and I will just do a concluding remark. Thank you. Yeah. While we're at that, next event is the second quarter 2022, 18th of August. I expect to see and hear some of you then. Hopefully this has been, so far, an event which we deliver according to expectation. It's a lot of work behind it, and also preparation work. Jon talked about business opportunities, product opportunities in the different verticals, which hopefully gave you more than you can understand from a quarterly presentation.
Pierre was talking about so many things that I started to be sweating and felt the pressure to deliver on all these kind of fantastic new products. As I said, we added to the slide yesterday evening, you know, these are roadmap scenarios, and they are scenarios because we need to follow where the customer wants to go at all time, of course. We need to be prepared also. If we start from scratch when customers start to talk to us about can we do this, can we do that? We can't start from scratch. We need to develop the technology bricks which prepare us to move fast when opportunity comes. Those bricks, Pierre nicely explained today. I know that's not easy to grasp everything.
You need to have a PhD in optics to do that. I'm sure that you will have the chance to ask more questions during the mingling phase. Marianne Sandal did a great sum up of where we are from the manufacturing perspective. Ole Morten made a great video showing us how things are assembled and the process behind it. After we started with poLight, it was not so many years because the product was kind of defined. Many of the millions you have been giving us, and the time we have used has basically been dedicated to get it right in manufacturing. This is not easy thing to do. Many people have been involved for many years to make this happen.
We are not at 100% yield today. We probably never will be. We have shown soon enough to understand that we will be at the high 90s plus for yield. I think we have an exciting years ahead of us. Next of this program is that Lars and also supported by Pierre and John will show you some TLenses and products using TLenses. We will start upstairs. You can bring some food with you or coffee or drinks, and then we will go down to the office area, where we'll do the product demonstration. You can see where we live. We can also, if some of you are interested, go down to the lab.
I would like to introduce Lars before we do that. Come. No, come here, Lars. Come here. Come. This is Lars. Yes. Yes. Lars, he's spent 20 years in poLight, 18 years to be exact. He is a specialist in polymer, a PhD and a doctorate degree in chemistry. Been working in hydro polymers. Been in SINTEF and, as I said, yeah, 18 years with poLight, which is impressive in itself. Lars is, for me, a little bit the father of today's polymer and yesterday's polymer and tomorrow's polymer, hopefully. Is really mastering that important part of poLight in a fantastic way. Lars will be here for you to show you around.
With those concluding remarks, I will say thank you for your attending. Thank you for your attending in the webcast. See you next time. Thank you.