
Meta taps Singular Photonics for single photon image sensors
A startup in Scotland has been working with tech giant Meta on an ultra-sensitive sensor for wearables.
Singular Photonics has developed two sensors based on arrays of single photon avalanche diodes (SPADs), initially aimed at medical applications.
The technology was developed at the University of Edinburgh lab of digital imaging pioneer Professor Robert Henderson. It adds in-pixel and cross-pixel storage and computations to SPAD-based image sensing at lowest light levels.
The company, covered by eenews Europe back in April 2024, is chaired by Peter Hutton, who is also chairman of Agile Analog Ltd. and Cambridge GaN Devices Ltd. and previously served as president of the product groups business at ARM after holding senior posts at Cadence Design Systems and Wolfson Microelectronics.
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The Andarta sensor was developed with Meta for wearables and can be used with watches or smart glasses. In October the company detailed a 512 × 512 SPAD array called ATLAS with embedded autocorrelation computation, implemented in 3D-stacked 65nm CMOS technology and is suitable for single-photon correlation spectroscopy applications, including diffuse correlation spectroscopy (DCS) with 820nm near infrared (NIR) light.
The shared per-macropixel SRAM architecture provides a 128 × 128 macropixel resolution, with parallel autocorrelation computation, with a minimum autocorrelation lag-time of 1 µs.
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 company’s first product, Sirona, is 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. It also includes on-chip histograms and time binning.
Singular says it has already inked multiple deals for its sensors with some of the world’s leading instrumentation companies and expects to announce more collaborations in 2025.
A SPAD uses the avalanche effect to convert a single photon into an electrical current, without the need for cooling or amplification. Singular’s core innovation lies in complex layers of computation beneath 3D-stacked SPAD sensors.
Prof Henderson leads the University of Edinburgh’s CMOS Sensors and Systems Group. In 2005, he designed one of the first SPAD image sensors in nanometer CMOS technologies, leading to the first time-of-flight sensors in 2013, which today perform an autofocus-assist feature in more than a billion smartphones worldwide.
“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,” said Henderson. “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.”
“We are in a unique position where we already have commercially available products and are generating revenue in our first year of incorporation,” said Shahida Imani, CEO of Singular Photonics. “With new, even more advanced sensors coming to the market in 2025, we are well positioned to lead the SPAD-driven imaging revolution.”
