How many start-ups emerge from stealth mode every year and go completely unnoticed? Perhaps we would know if there was anything about them that truly grabbed our attention–say a partnership with Meta, for example.
That may go at least part of the way to explain why UK-based start-up Singular Photonics has been garnering much attention of late. The firm, by its own description “emerged from stealth mode” recently touting two new, commercially-available CMOS image sensors based on single photon avalanche diodes (SPADs)--one of them co-developed with Meta.
That sensor, called Andarta, “has a miniature form factor combined with high sensitivity, and is optimized for use in a number of medical imaging modalities,” according to a Singular Photonics press release. “The sensor supports multiple modes of operation including in-pixel autocorrelation measurements, and represents a significant step closer to SPAD integration in the wearables space. For example, Andarta enables monitoring of the rate of cerebral blood flow, monitoring rapid fluctuations in light as it passes through tissue, at depths not currently possible with current sensors.”
The release did not quote Meta, or offer further details on what its plans might be for Andarta.
Singular’s other new sensor is Sirona, a 512 pixel SPAD-based line sensor capable of time-correlated single photon counting (TCSPC) and enabling Raman spectroscopy, fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy (FLIM), time-of-flight, and quantum applications. The last of those is especially notable given rising activity in the world of quantum computing and quantum sensing recently. SPADs aso have been seen as playing a role in quantum key distribution techniques for advanced cryptography.
Singular is showcasing its sensors at SPIE Photonics West in San Francisco Jan. 28-30, and the company said it “already inked multiple deals for its sensors with some of the world's leading instrumentation companies.” The firm also stated that it will announce more new sensors and “more collaborations” later this year.
SPAD technology has been around for a while, and its light detection capabilities have been leveraged in time-of-flight image and lidar sensors from several companies, but Singular claims to have enabled “the true potential of single photon detection, in-pixel and cross-pixel storage and computations at the lowest light levels to reveal previously invisible details of the material world and its photon events,” according to the release, which added, “...Singular's core innovation lies in complex layers of computation beneath 3D-stacked SPAD sensors, comparable to the way FPGAs and GPUs revolutionized parallel computing by conducting high-speed, localized processing.”
Prof. Robert Henderson, the globally-recognized CMOS image sensor expert from whose University of Edinburgh lab Singular was spun out, stated, "There can be no doubt that SPAD sensors are the future of digital imaging, but their use to date in commercial devices hasn't extended much beyond time-resolved counting of photons. Computational cleverness can be the difference. We are building next-generation imaging sensors, where the computation is done digitally at the pixel level – exactly where the photons arrive."
These methods allow “more information to be extracted from light,” which will support new consumer, automotive, scientific, and medical applications, the company said.