Samsung would work on metalens with the aim of eliminating the hated camera step that perforce rages on current products
Cameras that are increasingly resolute, More and more resolute cameras, precise by day and by night, with important zooms, but which, of necessity, end up protruding from the surfaces of smartphones that, on the one hand, try to be thin, but on the other hand cannot do without high quality cameras that, however, carry the disadvantage of important dimensions.
This is the genesis of the protruding camera groups, which in recent times have inevitably come to represent a constant in mobile telephony. On one hand, manufacturers have resigned themselves to having a step between the rear surface and the camera group, and on the other they have worked hard to reduce the different height of the two components to the minimum possible, even using periscope systems, for example, to zoom in significantly without impacting excessively on the final thickness of smartphones. The solution that would sweep away the compromises could be in the hands of Samsung, which according to a source in the South Korean media The Elec would have in development a metalens, or super lens.
Samsung’s metalens, thin but effective
Samsung’s metalens would have a flat structure with the surface studded with nanoparticles capable of refracting light. The principle behind this solution is similar to the Fresnel lens, but with a much higher precision and a much smaller thickness.
Samsung’s metalens would achieve the goal of keeping the advantages gained over time in terms of photographic quality – and maybe get more – and return, at the same time, to smartphones with a flat back surface, free of those steps that interfere with typing when the smartphone is resting. When Samsung will have developed the solution properly and will be ready to supply its partners with metalens, the current criticalities will be solved.
With hindsight, at the Nano Korea 2021 conference in Seoul, Lee Shi-woo, Senior Vice President and Director of Corporate Research Institute of Samsung Electronics, had already spoken about metalens, but without ever mentioning them directly. Shi-woo admitted that the company was analyzing the problem and studying the way to apply nanoparticles to lenses with the aim of sending in production a novelty that would have the potential to solve the current criticalities.
Not only metalens, developments also on MLCC
The Elec specified that the main problem that Samsung is trying to solve is to realize a production process that must be performed on a nanometer scale, when so far it has not gone beyond the seven-element lenses (7P lens). In addition, according to the same source, Samsung is also progressing on the front of multilayer ceramic capacitors or MLCC: here too would prove useful nanostructures, on which Samsung is working to thin after the cameras even the capacitors.