2023-Japan-Irradiant Technologies

DANIEL ORAN: Hello, everybody. My name is Daniel Oran. I am the founder and CEO of Irradiant Technologies. I did my PhD at the MIT Media Lab, and now we are spinning out that research into the company I'm here to talk to you about today.

At Irradiant we are creating a revolution in nanofabrication that unlocks the full potential of optics and photonics by 3D printing refractive index change in any 3D dimension with deeply subwavelength resolution. Our technology allows us to scalably manufacture optical and photonic components that have never before been possible.

For a little context, traditional optics and photonics are capable of precise 3D control over light. However, the nanoscale precision over large dimensions required by optics results in bulky and expensive components that must be meticulously assembled and aligned and which prototyping and manufacturing of both these components and the systems end up being slow, costly, and very volume limited.

People have tried to solve this problem by using integrated optics and photonics. However, the issues with traditional optics and photonics are solved in part, but it has several issues. Limited fabrication in terms of only being able to do 1D and 2D geometries, lack of good prototyping methods, and a restriction to only large volume production for economic feasibility. And this is relegated integrative photonics to a small subset of its possible applications over the past 20 years.

Our platform can build almost anything. It can do any possible geometry. This is a microscope image of something we've actually made. And we're able to do it with 50 nanometer resolution, with functional materials such as conductors, dielectrics, and semiconductors, and with gradient control over those materials. So we can control their concentration as well.

The way this works is we start out with a gel that we pattern a latent image inside. And we can do that extremely rapidly using light. Then we use chemistry to deposit materials where you want them to go. In this case, for the optics, high refractive index dielectrics. And then what's the special thing about what we do is we're then able to remove all the solvent and shrink these structures down, improving the resolution, reducing the error on the tool for fabrication, as well as densifying the materials. And this allows you to create structures with unprecedented precision.

So the value proposition that we're bringing is by combining ultrafast 3D lithography with this revolutionary new materials platform, we're able to rapidly prototype and mass manufacture using the same tools and processes while exploiting this huge expanded design space that the platform enables. And this fundamentally shifts what is possible by enabling agile development and manufacturing of components that have never before been possible.

And we do this by fabricating arbitrary refractive and refractive optics by putting high refractive index dielectric materials where we want them. And this enables us to control refractive index in any arbitrary 3D geometry with deeply subwavelength resolution. Essentially we can 3D print any arbitrary optic or photonic component.

One example of something we can make is something called a meta volume. And this complete control over refractive index essentially unlocks the ability to do higher bandwidth optical telecommunications with muxing and demuxing as well as superior sensing and imaging for cameras and sensors.

But the promise of 3D optics and photonics go far beyond that, essentially allowing for compact and complex optical components, dense and efficient routing and computation of information, superior sensing, ranging, and telecommunication, and miniaturized AR VR and medical devices.

We're in Japan initially to manufacture components for potential customers that are passive, as in they're not changing in time, that solve the broad pain point of getting light into and out of your photonic components better. And this is a strong need that many in the industry really have. And Japanese companies are leaders in optics and photonics. So we wish to partner with many of you to develop and manufacture the components that you need and deliver solutions that just haven't been possible before.

We've worked with a couple of Japanese photonic companies in the past, and we wish to work with more, because we've found them to be very forward thinking, especially in the space of optics and photonics. Thank you very much.

[APPLAUSE]

SPEAKER: Thanks, Dan.