CORE TECHNOLOGIES
As the core components of lighting devices and a reflection of the core technologies of our company, Raysees’ light source chips, which are independently designed and developed in-house, are to be implemented into our own light source products. Our chip design team have strong technical accumulation and industrial experiences in the structural design of VCSEL/EEL epitaxy and optimization of manufacturing workflow.
For Raysees, designing light source chips does not mean to just set up manufacturing lines in mainland China and replicate contemprary technologies, but aim to resolve certain pain points for customers of consumer electronics. Taking VCSEL chips as examples, which are paid more attention recently, our technologies intend to resolve several issues as follow:
- How to avoid patent infringement and meanwhile keep continuous innovation for start-up companies like Raysees since the patent portfolio are possessed by a few industrial giants?
- How to push forward 3D optical sensing by reducing both size and cost of light source chips?
- How to deal with different customer needs with a universal standard at the chip level?
- How to simplify the optical integration and meanwhile ensure optimized performance and reliable safety?
- As more challenges to chip design and light source packaging comes with mass production, how to maintain continual stability and reliability of the products?
Focusing on these issues, Raysees have developed relevant technologies on RFU,IMX and UPG, along with the corresponding patent portfolio strategy. Being a fabless company, Raysees maintain friendly collaboration with renown OEM factories. Our OEM management team consists of team members with more than 15 years experiences in mass production and OEM management.
Currently we have verified the mass production capability on hundreds of 6-inch wafers with our own VCSEL epitaxy, from which our light source products with optical power ranging from several mWatts to several Watts and wavelength at both 850nm and 940nm will be implemented into various application scenarios such as 3D structured light, proximity sensing, IR flood illumination and TOF.
For the first time in industry, the concept of high chip-to-packaging ratio is proposed by Raysees. Analogous to screen-to-body ratio for smartphones, the ratio between the chip area and the packaging area is a key parameter to evaluate the integrity of packaging. It is a precise packaging technique to obtain light sources of tiny sizes by effectively reducing the required area for packaging.
The high chip-to-packaging ratio does not just simplify take a smaller substrate to replace a normal sized substrate but also should consider various factors such as cooling, power consumption and performance. By delicate packaging workflow design and material development, the size of our light source products with high chip-to-packaging ratio can be highly reduced and meanwhile keep the thermal resistance at the same or even less than the light source products with normal packaging size. In addition, the small packaging scale at chip level can highly simplify the design and integration of the optical systems, which provide more adaptability to consumer electronics. More importantly, through innovation, the reduced cost of our light source products will provide more marginal profit to our customers.
Figure: Comparison between a light source product with normal packaging (Left)
and that with the high chip-to-packaging ratio (Right) by Raysees.
The technology of 1.5th optical integration, short for the 1.5th optics, is first introduced by Raysees. The 1.5th optics, termed in comparison to the primary and secondary optics, retains the packaging size of only the primary optics and meanwhile manipulates the light rays as perfectly as the oversized secondary optics, which, to an extent, can be regarded as an authentic optical integration at component-level. Armed with the proprietary 1.5th optics technique, the FRay™ series flood illuminating light sources, particularly developed for 3D optical sensing, are introduced by Raysees with the intention to bring revolutionary change and progress to 3D face recognition devices using structured light technology, on both cost reduction and performance enhancement.
Figure: Comparison between LED with the primary secondary optics (left and middle) and that with the 1.5th-optics technology by Raysees.
The 1.5th optical integrating tehcnology functions equivalently as the conventional primary+secondary optics but with highly reduced packaging size to component-level, which is more adaptable to the trend of consumer electronics with smaller and smaller sizes. The reduced packaging dimensions effectively lower the consumption of packaging materials and simplify the packaging workload, therefore systematically lower the cost of the light source products. Moreover, since the alignment of the light chips and the optical lens has already been carried out during the process of component-level packaging, there is no need to spend extra cost for the installation and alignment of the secondary optics, which totally avoids the cost due to extra equipment and product defect rate.
Figure: FRay™ series of flood illumination LEDs for 3D optical sensing.
Currently, by cooperating with a supplier renowned for 3D sensing algorithms and solutions, FRay™ series products by Raysees have been tested. By comparing with conventional LEDs previously employed by the supplier, FRay™ series show great enhancements of illuminating uniformity and brightness, especially for long working distance at about 60cm, which is demonstrated in the following figure. By illuminating onto a same plaster bust, FRay™ series can capture more details of the head with enhanced uniformity and brightness.
Figure: Comparison of the effects of flood illumination between conventional LEDs and FRay™ series by Raysees. (Object distance 60cm)
Raysees proprietary 1.5th optical integration technology provides more options for semi-conductor light source products with its competitive performance, cost and applicability. As a component-level packaging technology, the 1.5th optics can be widely applied to LED and VCSEL packaging. At this moment, our light source products armed with this technology have been successfully implemented into wide range of devices such as commercial lighting, iris recognition, 3D vision and so on.
Figure: The size of commercial lighting product equipped with 1.5th-optics by Raysees (below) will be highly reduced compared with that of conventional optical solutions (above).
An optical sensing solution is a complex system which combines light source chips, optical lens, sensors and algorithms, with the intention to suit a particular application using optical sensing technique. With booming of artificial intelligence and AR/VR, more and more application in need of optical sensing technique appear, hence push forward the demanding for various optical sensing solutions in which the light source chip plays a vital role.
In an optical sensing system, there exist strong correlations between different parts such as light chips, optical lens and algorithms. Thus, it requires insightful understanding how each individual part works, as well as lots of experiences, to make the whole system work harmonically at the best performance and the lowest possible power consumption. Conventionally, an optical sensing system, with light chips and optical lens as its core components, relies on supply chains to source all the components before they are integrated into a working system, which usually cost large amounts of economic and time. Apart from that, for consideration of cost reduction and mass production, light products on market incline to pursue universal configurations and lack flexibility to meet customer’s specific needs. Or, once the customer’s need should be modified, it is very possible that the whole ongoing solution would be overthrown and restarted.
In order to resolve this issue and provide customized solutions with more flexibility to the customers, Raysees founded professional teams of hardware, software and algorithms, with our independent light chip design and optical integration as solid basis, to provide our customers entire optical sensing solutions such as biometric identification, security surveillance, autonomous driving and robotics.
With our powerful in-house R&D, Raysees products can to an extent be free of restriction of the universal products on the market and relieve the dependence on supply chains, hence can supply more flexible solutions to customers in a shorter period. Benefited from our independent R&D on light chips, optical integration and algorithms, not only the cost and power consumption of our products can be effectively reduced, but also the period to modify an ongoing project can be shortened if any change requested by customers would happen.
With experiences in technical innovation and product development accumulated during a long period of commercial services, Raysees intend to remove unnecessary barriers between different fields of industry and form a closed service loop with the idea of ‘solution to meet the customer needs and the customer needs to optimize solution’.