Demonstration of unified metalens workflow through design and manufacture of example eye-tracking meta-optic

Metalenses and other metasurfaces are now established in academic settings and are approaching adoption in commercial applications. One of the major challenges in further development in this area is the coordination of system design with component design and manufacturing. There has been a significant communication gap between the optical systems designers who work with ray-tracing software, component designers who work with phase-profiles calculated with full-wave optical simulations, and metasurface manufacturers who work to turn the designs into actual elements. The need to perform this communication while also ensuring that the details of each organization’s plans and methods are kept secret is challenging. Moxtek is collaborating with Ansys to bridge these gaps to establish a robust workflow that will allow optical systems designers to easily optimize a metasurface to maximize optical performance and be confident that the design is suitable for manufacturing. We demonstrate this workflow by walking through the design, layout, manufacturing, and metrology of an eye-tracking system for XR devices. This metalens was designed with ray-tracing software to have imaging properties that are difficult to create by conventional metalens design methods. The layout file was created using the manufacturer’s established geometries that are known to be suitable for mass-production, which enabled the manufacturer to follow their own best-practices during the manufacturing process. Simulations were performed to predict the performance of the optic in a wafer-scale metrology tool, allowing a 1-to-1 comparison of simulation and metrology. Finally, the meta-optic was incorporated into a complete eye-tracking system and the performance of the complete system compared to the initial design.