The race to replace VCM: a survey.

The size of the prize

During the days of the Helimorph it was tempting to think that CML was ploughing a lonely furrow in its quest to supplant Voice Coil Motors in smartphone cameras.  In fact, this was far from the case.  The role of VCM in the smartphone camera has been the subject of continuous assault.  Right from the start, electronic design engineers around the globe have been focused on the same goal, exploring a variety of technical approaches to constructing a superior mechanism that supplies the motive force to the lens.

The market for camera actuators, currently dominated by VCM, represents a significant “prize” as it is directly geared to the growth in smartphone cameras. Actuators for autofocus purposes are now so ubiquitous that all the growth in revenue has come from the expanding demand for OIS actuators, being more expensive and therefore restricted – for the moment – to premium phones.  What innovators were seeking was a better way of controlling lenses, including any method of modifying the shape of a lens (“deform” in the trade) directly in response to an electrical signal without the intervention of an actuator.  This appendix aims to identify and describe all known organisations intent upon challenging the lens-moving status quo. In short, those operating in the same space as CML.

Alternative technological approaches

What are the alternative ways in which lens movement can be achieved? None of these technologies is new. Broadly, the technological approaches aiming to dethrone VCM fall into six categories.

1. Modified conventional lens
2. Piezoelectric motor lens
3. MEMS lens
4. Liquid lens
5. LCD lens
6. Memory material motor lens

There is a considerable overlap between these various approaches. Several are hybrid, in that they combine two of these technologies. It is worth recalling the features that mobile phone manufacturers demand from any lens-moving technology.

• Small, particularly low height
• Light weight
• Reliability in use
• Low power consumption
• Force – the ability to move heavier lenses
• Low cost
• Non-magnetic – to avoid interference with other components
• Reproducibility/manufacturability

Of these, as we have seen throughout the text, the last point is crucial. The humdrum business of “manufacturability” is deeply unglamourous compared to the intellectual satisfaction of an elegant engineering solution.  Eking out incremental improvements on a production line receives few plaudits. Yet this is what VCM has done. 

Modified conventional lenses

In 2006, Ren Ng, a researcher at Stanford University in California created a new type of digital camera which he called a light-field or plenoptic camera.  This is because it captures information about the light field emanating from a scene: the intensity of light in a scene and the precise direction that the light rays are traveling in space.  Conventional cameras record only light intensity.  This new device had several advantages over conventional cameras but, for our purposes, the key one was its ability to refocus images after they had been taken.

Dr. Ng formed a company, Lytro, to commercialise his invention. It was funded by a number of Silicon Valley venture capital firms.  By 2012 Lytro had introduced a consumer camera.  It was expensive and cumbersome. Take-up was minimal and Lytro shifted to applying its technology to professional cinema and virtual reality. In March 2018, it ceased trading. The failure was expensive.  Investors had put in a total of $140mn. The company may have failed but the Lytro idea did not die.

Light-field was picked up by another Silicon Valley start-up, Pelican Imaging. Pelican had the idea of using software to build upon what Lytro had demonstrated. Today we would call it computational photography. Pelican decided to license its patented technology to third parties. The company raised $7mn in 2009 from several investors, including Qualcomm.  A year later it received an investment from a company called In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the Central Intelligence Agency. IQT invests in high-tech companies to keep the CIA and other intelligence agencies equipped with the latest in information technology. (Apparently, the name “In-Q-Tel” is an intentional reference to “Q”, the fictional inventor who supplies technology to James Bond).  An investment from IQT invariably acts as a stamp of approval for would-be investors.

When Pelican told the world what it had been doing in early 2013, the announcement generated much excitement. This was a typical reaction:

“Pelican Imaging aims to free all of us from focus anxiety by eliminating the need for focusing altogether. Images come out of its camera module entirely in focus, from foreground all the way to the background. Users will be able to fiddle with the focus after the fact – as with a Lytro – but don’t have to. It is a true “fire and forget” solution to the problem of autofocus.” (“Pelican Imaging aims to free us from focus anxiety”, ITProPortal, April 15, 2013).

Pelican Imaging’s product made use of a small array of 16 inexpensive, miniature, mass produced cameras, each consisting of an individual sensor and lens. By September 2013, in collaboration with Qualcomm, Pelican was able to demonstrate its camera module working in an Android tablet.

During 2013 Pelican raised a further $20mn in equity from VCs and Nokia Growth Partners, Nokia’s investment arm. It soon emerged that Nokia planned a 2014 launch of a new model in its Lumia range incorporating Pelican’s technology.  Nokia had always had a good reputation for the quality and capability of its cameras, so it made sense to reach for innovative photographic technology to try and recover lost ground.  In the event, Pelican’s array and its associated computational software never appeared in a Nokia handset. The period following the Microsoft takeover was a time of turmoil at Nokia.  By mid-2015, Pelican was running out of money and had to make drastic cuts. Pelican clung on until November 2016 when it sold its IP assets (comprising over 200 patents) to Tessera Corporation, predominately a consumer technology IP licensing business. All in all, including debt, it is likely, over its eight-year life, that $50mn was committed to commercialising the Pelican Imaging technology.

However, the idea of creating a better conventional lens lived on. It was revived in 2017 by a Boston-based start-up, Metalenz. Rather than issuing press releases, Metalenz adopted the route of using tech websites, podcasts and reputable journals to explain to the world what it was doing. As intended, this generated much interest, as per the extract below.

“A new start-up out of Harvard Labs has invented a way to print camera lenses 5,000 at a time just like computer chips, and in the same semiconductor foundries that make our computer’s CPUs. They’re 100X thinner than standard smartphone camera lenses, are simpler and cheaper to make, sense the full electromagnetic spectrum — not just visible light — and have excellent 3D-sensing capabilities that could bring Lidar-based dimensional sensing functionality that’s currently only on high-end phones like the iPhone 12 to smartphones across the price spectrum.” (“TechFirst” podcast with John Koetsier, February 5, 2021).

What Metalenz offered was revolutionary. Instead of using multiple plastic lens elements stacked facing an image sensor, the product consists of a single lens built on a glass wafer. Basically, metalenses (with an “s”) – the generic term for the technology – are flat surfaces designed to replace full-size optics employing a wholly different method of bending and controlling light. These lenses additionally possess the great advantage that they can be produced en masse in wafer fabs.

Metalenz has multiple benefits in 3D sensing applications, and this is the sector the company is pursuing. The company’s website states unequivocally: “We are defining the future of sensing”.  With the focus on sensing, Metalenz is not – happily for CML and others in the lens-moving space – offering a product aimed at replacing mainstream rear cameras.  In June 2021 Metalenz announced a co-development and licence agreement with ST Microelectronics.  Metalenz technology replaced three or four conventional lenses with a single meta-optic lens. The partnership was publicised in a high-profile advertising campaign, as shown below.

Early in 2024, Metalenz revealed that, in association with Qualcomm and Samsung, it was targeting face identification for Android phones. Metalenz’s meta-optic biometric imaging solution offered higher resolution than FaceID with a concomitant improvement in the level of security. It is also smaller and intrinsically cheaper to manufacture. Apple equally was drawn to Metalenz, attracted by the opportunity to reduce the cost of FaceID. Finance at Metalenz has not been an issue, given the company’s pedigree and the promise it has shown. By October 2022 it had raised $47.4mn from high-grade VC investors and corporates. These include Intel Capital, TDK and 3M.

Piezoelectric actuators

Piezoelectricactuators are, of course, familiar ground. CML’s ill-fated Helimorph operated on piezoelectric transducer principles. In 2005 an American start-up called New Scale Technologies, founded by an inventor who became its CEO and then its Chief Technical Officer, announced it was developing miniature piezoelectric motors to drive autofocus in mobile phone cameras. Henderson called his patented design a “Squiggle” motor. By 2008, New Scale had secured licence agreements with TDK and Alps. Indeed, Alps gave New Scale an engineering contract with a view to Alps using the Squiggle motor to move lenses in forthcoming mobile phones. The firm continued to promote its technology for smartphone cameras until 2012. Faced with a lack of traction, New Scale increasingly turned away from the consumer sector into more specialised industrial, medical and scientific fields. 

In 2004 a large and successful Hong Kong listed company, Johnson Electric, acquired a majority stake in a small Japanese company called Nihon Mini Motor which specialised in actuators for moving lenses in digital cameras.  Nihon Mini Motor claimed a one-third share of the digital camera actuator market, so Johnson thought it logical to combine Nihon’s competitive position with some recently-acquired piezoelectric expertise and make a bid to enter the nascent camera phone market. Accordingly, in November 2005, it announced “NanoLens”, “the highest performance autofocus lens module”. Nanolens was still being promoted in 2007 but, after that, it was heard of no more.

poLight (note the small “p” and large “L”) is a Norwegian start-up that has many similarities with CML. It was founded in 2005, around the time that CML came up with SMA. The company originated as a spin-off from a research-based firm which had been working on soft polymer material for telecommunications components. poLight differs markedly from CML in one respect.  It was funded originally by rounds of venture capital, from Norwegian and other Scandinavian investment institutions.

The proprietary technology that poLight offers was, like CML initially, aimed at the smartphone autofocus market.  It is based on the same piezoelectric material used by the Helimorph which performs the role of an actuator. The piezo material on the membrane is designed to change the shape of a transparent polymer film when a voltage is applied to it, imitating the focussing function of the human eye. The “secret sauce” is poLight’s patented polymer film that sits beneath the flexible glass membrane. Like SMA, “TLens” has several advantages over VCM in its autofocus function. This structure creates what poLight calls a tuneable lens. Hence the tradename “TLens”. 

It took a long time to launch TLens onto the market.  One reason for this is that poLight uses MEMS to manufacture its actuator.  As we have observed previously, MEMS is a successful technique for creating sensors, such as gyroscopes, accelerometers and pressure sensors, but is substantially less successful when it comes to actuators. MEMS operates in conjunction with semiconductor technology but differs significantly from it, requiring a different set of capabilities and competencies. poLight’s expertise resides in the polymer. To manufacture the T-Lens it needed to establish a collaboration with a semiconductor producer capable of constructing MEMS components.  poLight turned to ST Microelectronics.

By 2016 poLight had absorbed $45mn in four VC funding rounds and a TLens AF actuator had yet to see the light of day. (Bear in mind that CML’s SMA autofocus actuator first became commercially available in a Panasonic phone in 2010). PoLight went public on the Oslo Stock Exchange in October 2018. The IPO prospectus revealed that poLight was in discussion with 18 potential customers but had yet to achieve a design win.  The company decided to broaden its offering into additional, more niche, areas rather than aim solely for the AF camera actuator market. Unlike CML, poLight is constrained by the inherent characteristics of its TLens technology – which does not permit the necessary transverse movement – from expanding to OIS.

As a public company, poLight is gratifyingly transparent on the progress it has made. It has secured design wins in a wide range of products from some well-known names in the consumer market, including for VR/AR devices, and in certain industrial sectors, notably barcode readers and machine vision systems. A smartphone design win eluded poLight until March 2023 when it revealed it had achieved a contract to supply AF actuators for the front-facing camera on a version of the Meizu 20 handset (for which CML supplied main camera OIS actuator). poLight’s handset penetration has been handicapped by its lack of an OIS offering. Confined to selfie cameras, which had – and have – a lower priority than main cameras, it has found itself in a smartphone cul-de-sac.

On the other hand, PoLight has successfully pursued niche markets. The problem is that, being niche, volumes are low: thousands rather than hundreds of thousands or millions. Consequently, the aggregate revenues generated are very modest.  In 2024, poLight reported a turnover of around than £$1mn accompanied by a large pre-tax loss.  The share price performance has, unsurprisingly, been abysmal.

poLight benefits from a supportive group of Nordic institutional shareholders, seemingly ever willing to put up more money to allow the company to pursue its ambitions. In view of the meagre revenues produced so far and the focus on niche markets, it is a moot point whether the volumes envisaged from current projects can ever produce a satisfactory return.  poLight received a much-needed boost in April 2025 when Q Technology, the Chinese camera module integrator, agreed to inject $16mn of equity into the company in return for a one-third shareholding. In aggregate, poLight had absorbed approximately $115mn by mid-2025.

In South Korea, the well-named PiezoElectric Technology Co.,founded in 2000, made a bid for the smartphone autofocus business from its base in actuators for digital cameras. It was not successful. Konica Minolta, the Japanese camera company, also introduced a piezoelectric AF actuator for mobiles in 2010.  It subsequently disappeared from view.  In 2021 MinebeaMitsumi disclosed that it was working on an ultrasonic motor OIS actuator to replace VCM. It has not been seen since, probably because camera actuators are longer a strategically significant product for the company (see Chapter 15). 

A further attempt to create a piezoelectric actuator came from an unusual source. Scientists and engineers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Optics and Precision Engineering in Germany announced they had developed a piezoelectric actuator for AF and OIS. In October 2022 Fraunhofer offered the technology for licence. It is not known whether there has been any take-up.  Then, in 2023, something unexpected happened. Piezoelectric “got lucky”.  An opportunity arose in optical zoom lenses as module makers raced to install periscope cameras. Alps Alpine announced that, in addition to offering VCM and SMA, it was developing a piezoelectric actuator.

MEMS

MEMS was explained in chapter 11.  Although a technological category in our list, is really a production method. It can be combined with piezoelectric technology, as poLight does. A piezoelectric microelectromechanical (MEMS) system is a miniature device that uses piezoelectricity to generate motion and carry out its tasks. 

First out of the blocks in the race to create a MEMS AF actuator was Digital Optics Corporation (DOC), the Imaging and Optics Segment of what was then called Tessera Technologies (the same Tessera that later bought what was left of Pelican Imaging). A year later, Tessera renamed the division “DigitalOptics Segment”. Substantial resources were devoted to this project. The 2011 Tessera Annual Report stated:

“In 2012, we plan to transform DigitalOptics into a state-of-the-art camera module manufacturer. This strategy requires substantial investments in manufacturing assets, working capital and a global organization to capture a significant share of the multibillion-dollar camera module market.”

By 2012 DigitalOptics had designed a MEMS AF actuator relying on the electrostatic principle, dubbed “mems/cam”. Electrostatics relies on “comb drives”: two opposing rows of tiny fins fabricated in silicon that attract and repel each other when an electric field is applied between them. To support the push into mobile optics, Tessera, in June 2012, purchased a camera module manufacturing business from Flextronics for $29 million.  In October 2013 Oppo announced that it was working with DigitalOptics to introduce a smartphone with MEMS-based autofocus. Launched in 2012, the Oppo “Ulike 2” was aimed at women and had a staggeringly large – for the time – 5MP frontcamera. DigitalOptics provided the algorithm for its beautification features.

Subsidised by Tessera’s profitable IP licensing business, large deficits were recorded at DigitalOptics for several years due to heavy investment in R & D. Failed promises meant that Tessera came under acute shareholder pressure and, in January 2014, Tessera announced the closure of DigitalOptics. It had been unable to sell the business despite having built prototypes against a production order from Oppo.  Over the period 2010-13, DigitalOptics invested an average of $50mn a year in R & D. Given its overriding priority within the company, it is reasonable to estimate that half of this expenditure was devoted to the mems/cam project, suggesting a total commitment of $100mn. In hindsight, Tessera’s helter skelter four-year plunge into MEMS actuators seems profligate in the extreme.

Seeing the writing on the wall, a group of engineers headed by Colin Kwan, the Hong Kong-educated Sales VP for China, left DigitalOptics and formed MEMS Drive to develop an OIS MEMS actuator for mobile devices.  Effectively, the team took the project with them. Initial funding of $12mn came from several Asian corporates, notably Oppo, GalaxyCore and Sunny Optical. Doubtless Colin Kwan’s China connections played an important role. A subsequent $11mn round in 2016 was led by Walden International, a venture capital firm founded by Lip-Bu Tan who is now CEO of Intel.

By March 2016 MEMS Drive had developed, in collaboration with Oppo, a prototype MEMS OIS actuator, based on the (then) revolutionary idea of moving the image sensor in the phone rather than the lens. This joint development was publicly promoted with much fanfare by Oppo as an effective OIS solution. Unfortunately for MEMS Drive, it was not followed by a design win from Oppo. Oppo continued to use VCM.

Then, in 2019, in a tacit admission of failure, MEMS Drive linked up with a Hong Kong company to pursue applications for image stabilisation beyond the mobile sphere.  MEMS Drive secured further equity in two more funding rounds, in 2021 and 2024, bringing total investment to an estimated $40mn.  MEMS Drive continues to pursue mobile OIS for Chinese customers, as evidenced by the opening of several offices in China.  There is no hard evidence of a breakthrough into the smartphone OIS actuator market.

At the same time as DigitalOptics was working on its MEMS actuator project in California, another MEMS-based research group in France was pursuing an alternative approach. In November 2012 three engineers, headed by Dr. Sebastien Bolis, left a research institute based in Grenoble, and formed Wavelens.  There is no information on how Wavelens was funded.   While the Wavelens system required actuators to achieve autofocus, it also relied on oil flowing through a membrane, thus modifying its curvature and focal length. There was therefore a liquid lens element in the Wavelens technology so it could arguably be classified under that heading.  In 2015 Wavelens announced that it was in partnership with OmniVision, the Chinese image sensor company, to bring this technology to smartphone cameras.  In July 2017 Wavelens was formally dissolved. Effectively, the venture had ceased in 2016 when Sebastien Bolis joined Apple as a Hardware Engineering Senior Manager.

Following Richard Topliss’s move from CML to Applein 2012 as Senior Camera Technology Specialist, it is understandable that Apple wanted to use his expertise to invent their own non-VCM camera actuator. In 2014, two patents were granted to Apple with his name on them for MEMS-based electrostatic and piezoelectric actuators. As do other tech firms, Apple patents many inventions that never move beyond the laboratory. These fall into that category.

Yet another company went down the same technical path as MEMS Drive.  The exotically named Sheba Microsystemsis a spin-off from the University of Toronto. Sheba is a fabless semiconductor company. It uses MEMS foundries to fabricate its devices. Sheba introduced two electrostatic MEMS actuators for phone camera autofocus in February 2017. All then went quiet until 2019, when the company announced a complete AF plus OIS solution for mobile phone cameras. This was followed by another silence until October 2021 when Sheba launched an enhanced AF actuator for smartphones. These products have made no discernible headway. 

The overwhelming message emanating from the Sheba Microsystems website is that the company has largely given up on the smartphone market and is instead specialising in autofocus actuators for cameras operating in demanding environments. It retains a toehold in handsets by offering, like poLight, an autofocus solution for front-facing cameras. Where Sheba obtains its financing is a matter for conjecture. The Company’s head of finance is the managing director of US-based Seabridge Capital, a wealth management firm formed in December 2000 to manage the offshore assets of several families, both domestic and international.  At a guess, with on-going support from the university, it may have absorbed $25mn by 2024.

Why have MEMS actuators not succeeded on the same scale as sensors, at least not yet? The evidence suggests that manufacturing issues lie at the heart of the problem. Electrostatic MEMS devices, in particular, require extremely precise micromachining, more so than piezoelectric-based actuators.  More to the point, MEMS is fundamentally dependent on silicon processing technology, which produces transistors on a scale of nanometres. By contrast, MEMS actuator components are on a scale of tens of micrometres, a thousand times bigger.  Consequently, a MEMS actuator occupies an inordinate amount of silicon real estate.  The intrinsic advantage of silicon processing – the ability to fabricate nanoscale components – is therefore lost in regard to MEMS actuators. 

Liquid lenses

Liquid lensesare an entirely different proposition, consisting of a fluid within a container able to bend light before it reaches the sensor. Typically, the lens comprises two liquids (oil and water) embedded inside a transparent cell. Electrowetting force (wetting the angle of one liquid with respect to the other) causes the interface between the oil and the water to change shape, turning it into a “tunable” lens. Electrical or mechanical force is used to change the shape of the lens, offering an infinite number of lens shapes. Conceptually, it is a highly attractive, possibly obviating the need for both actuator and the associated driver chip to exert physical pressure on fluid-containing membrane. Instead, the application of a voltage changes the curvature of the lens. 

Liquid lens technology was invented and patented by a research physicist, Dr. Bruno Berge, working at the University of Grenoble in the late 1990s. To exploit his invention Dr. Berge founded Variopticin Lyon in 2002. Varioptic lenses utilise electrowetting to adjust focus. They achieve this by changing the curvature of a liquid interface with an applied voltage, essentially “actuating” the lens directly without mechanical intervention. Seed finance came from the university plus several other public bodies with further funding from two French venture capital firms.  The company soon attracted the interest of the Samsung affiliate, SEMCO.  In June 2004 Varioptic signed a manufacturing licence for the fabrication of liquid lenses in SEMCO’s camera modules.  There was talk of a commercial product in the final quarter of 2005. It never emerged. Then, in 2007, Varioptic announced a partnership with Sunny Optical to launch a liquid lens AF camera module. The device attracted much attention but failed to achieve the necessary design win.

In March 2008, Varioptic and Seiko Instruments announced the fruits of a joint venture they had set up to bring liquid lenses to mobiles. As described in Chapter 9, we know that CML had been heavily engaged with Seiko for about a year at that time. Seiko had – understandably – hedged its bets by working in parallel with Varioptic. This would explain Seiko’s reluctance to sign a licence agreement with CML until June 2009. Presumably they only did so when it became clear that the Varioptic technology was not going to work.

In 2011 Varioptic was acquired by a French company, Parrot Drones.  Meanwhile, the project to develop a liquid lens for the mobile market was taken over by a newly incorporated Silicon Valley firm, Optilux, headed by Varioptic’s CEO, an industry veteran. Optilux raised equity but, by end year, it had folded. Sensibly, in 2016, Parrot Drones sold Varioptic to a Californian company, Invenios, a micro-fabrication foundry specialising in glass structuring and glass bonding. Invenios had been working on liquid lenses since 2012.  By the end of the year, the company had been acquired by Corning, the $11bn turnover American glass company. Corning put its weight behind Varioptic and the technology became accepted in industrial markets, for barcode readers, machine vision and medical imaging applications.

What of the ambition to insert liquid lenses into smartphones? Corning is well known to all smartphone producers owing to its leadership in the supply of specially toughened “Gorilla” cover glass for handsets. As such, it has an entrée into the business denied a smaller company. In July 2021 came the news that Corning was collaborating with LG Innotek, which first filed patents on liquid lenses in 2016. Together they are apparently attempting to turn this technology into something real and practical.

As for the money associated with Varioptic’s long foray into lenses, its initial period as an independent start-up absorbed $37mn in venture capital. The Optilux incarnation might have added another $3mn. Invenios received $10mn of VC funding in June 2016. How much Corning (and LG Innotek) have committed to the smartphone liquid lens project is impossible to tell. $25mn seems a reasonable estimate. This produces a grand total of $75mn.

Liquid lens received a boost in March 2021 when, much to the surprise of the mobile phone community, Xiaomirevealed it would be using the technology in a forthcoming model, the Mi Mix Fold. When it arrived, there was a flurry of interest. The liquid lens was employed on one of the three cameras. The other two, a main camera and an ultra-wide camera, were conventional. Because the liquid lens can of itself adjust for focal length, it doubled as a telephoto camera and also as a macro camera for close photography. The Xiaomi Mix Fold looked like this. 

Xiaomi was coy about the source of its technology but, after a while, it became apparent that the company was in partnership with a Swiss firm called Nextlens. Set up in 2019, Nextlens is a spin-off from Optotune, a medium-sized, private Swiss optical components company. Optotune has tunable lenses as its core technology. It competes directly with Corning in industrial liquid lenses. Both a manufacturing and an IP generation business, it actively seeks licensees for its portfolio of optical patents. Funding for Nextlens came from Optotune and, as the company has generated some revenue, expenditure is estimated at a modest $15mn by the end of 2024.  Optotune tunable lenses consist of an optical fluid filled container sealed with a polymer membrane. This technology differs from that used by Corning Varioptic in that it needs an actuator. The actuator exerts pressure on the membrane, causing the curvature of the lens (and therefore the optical power) to change.  The actuator used in the Mix Fold was a high-quality VCM of Xiaomi’s own design.

After the initial burst of interest, little was heard of the Xiaomi Mi Mix Fold’s camera. Xiaomi has historically used its Mix range to try out new concepts. And so it has turned out. When the next model, the Mix Fold 2, appeared in the summer of 2022 the liquid lens had been quietly dropped.  Liquid lenses lived on, though. In December 2023, Transission’s Tecno brand announced what it called its “Liquid Telephoto Macro Lens”, the first application of the technology in a smartphone periscope telephoto camera. Tecno stated its intention of building it into a future handset. The source of the technology was not revealed but it soon surfaced on the Opportune website. Nothing has emerged since then.

Liquid Crystal Display

Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) technology has also been mooted as a means of creating tunable lenses for smartphones. The application of LCD to lenses was pioneered by a Californian company, LensVector, based on technology developed at Laval University, Quebec City, Canada.  When the company was formed in 2006, LensVector exclusively licensed the original patents from Laval and hired the core team. The company presented itself to investors as a developer of autofocus technology for camera phone lenses. Rather than physically moving a lens element, LensVector applied a small control voltage to dynamically change the refractive index of the material the light passed through.   LensVector’s product had several advantages over VCM.  Moreover, the product could all be realised in silicon. 

Initial funding came from a well-known Silicon Valley venture capital firm. By 2010 the company had raised a further $46.5mn from VC investors and also four leading industrial corporations: Samsung, Mitsui, Foxconn and Kodak. The Financial Times had this to say:

“The company, founded in 2006, emerged from four years in stealth mode today to announce its first product – an autofocus created with no moving parts – on silicon. “The vision of the company is to replace all the mechanical aspects of a camera with solid-state alternatives, starting with autofocus,” Derek Proudian, chief executive, told me.” (Chris Nutall, Financial Times, 4 February 2010)

Subsequently, LensVector announced it had combined forces with Sunny Optical to produce the world’s smallest 5MP autofocus camera. A year later the technology was in a smartphone made and being sold by a firm called Vital Mobile under the Karbonn brand in Taiwan, Bangladesh and India. No other handset vendor showed interest.

LensVector benefited from a further six VC funding rounds, including an investment and strategic development agreement with the CIA’s In-Q-Tel. By 2015, after nine years of commitment, the amount raised had reached an estimated $85mn.  At some point in 2015 or 2016 LensVector realised that the company’s LCD lens for smartphones was not going to fly. Professional lighting emerged as an alternative opportunity. The firm now describes itself as operating in the architectural lighting sector.

LCD technology continues to attract interest, however. Scope Photonics, a Canadian start-up, is promoting its novel technology in which custom-built lenses change their focal range with just an applied electrical signal. Scope was founded in 2020 by a group of engineering students at the University of Waterloo, Ontario. Smartphone cameras are the initial target, but the company believes that its LCD technology will be effective in other applications. Funding so far has consisted of seed capital. There has been no news of progress since 2020.

Shape Memory Materials

The final category, Shape Memory, is, of course, dominated by CML and its extensive portfolio of SMA-related patents, covering mechanical, optical, electrical, algorithm and silicon design. Despite the defensive wall thrown up around the use of SMA for smartphone AF and OIS purposes, other companies have continued to investigate this area.

A patent published in June 2014, showed that Apple was active in trying to find a better way of moving lenses before the recruitment of Richard Topliss in 2013. The patent was entitled “Artificial muscle camera actuator”. “Artificial muscle” referred to the employment of a smart material. Not SMA but Electroactive Polymer. EAP is a Shape Memory Polymer as opposed to a Shape Memory Alloy. The principle of operation is exactly the same. Following Richard Topliss’s move to Apple, there was concern within CML that, given his deep knowledge of the field, he would devise a way of circumventing the SMA patent wall, a concern that was heightened when he recruited another CML employee, a high-level software person, to work with him (the control algorithms, of course, being a critical element in the use of SMA). In the end, nothing tangible emerged from this line of research and Apple stuck with VCM.

The Japanese companies, Konica Minolta and Nidec Corporation, both researched SMA between 2004 and 2011. Konica Minolta’s interest stemmed from its digital camera business (which it exited in 2006). Between 2002 and 2011 it obtained at least a dozen patents relating to the use of Nitinol wire in actuators. Nidec, one of the largest electric motor manufacturers in the world, originally investigated SMA for smartphones. It dropped SMA in 2015 and announced what it called “TiltAS”.  This moved the entire camera module so can be regarded as a precursor to CML’s module tilt technology in 2021. Nothing more has been heard of TiltAS since.

A recent search of US published patents revealed that others in the industry are still active in exploring SMA actuation. Since 2010 patent applications have been filed by Hon Hai (Foxconn), Sunny Optical, LG Innotek and Jahwa Electronics. Equally, academic institutions have been active in seeking out memory alloy materials superior to Nitinol wire.

More concerning for CML over the years has been the ever-present risk of an SMA-based challenge from Samsung, given the range and depth of its research endeavours. Nothing surfaced until July 2019, when SEMCO was granted a US patent for a camera module containing an actuator driven by SMA wires. Then, in August 2022, Samsung Electronics, in collaboration with Korean university researchers, published a paper in the scientific journal Nature Communications entitled “Actuating Compact Wearable Augmented Reality Devices by Multifunctional Artificial Muscle”. On the face of it, this device competes directly with CML’s SMA. Samsung’s name for it is “compliant amplified SMA actuator” (CASA).  CASA confirms that Samsung has not given up on the idea of developing an SMA actuator.

The race to replace VCM: summary

The table below lists all the would-be innovators in the lens-moving/lens modification space, the duration of the project and the estimated amount spent. In some cases, the investment number is a publicly available figure but for many it is a matter of estimation.        

Company	Duration	Estimated Investment ($mn)
Lytro	2006-18	140
Pelican Imaging	2008-16	50
Metalenz	2016-	47
New Scale Technologies	2002-14	10
Johnson Electric	2004-7	3
poLight	2005-	115
PiezoElectric Technology Co.	2005-8	3
Konica Minolta	2008-11	5
MinebeaMitsumi	2020-	5
Fraunhofer	2019-	10
Alps Alpine	2020-	15
DigitalOptics	2010-14	100
MEMS Drive	2014-	40
Wavelens	2012-17	2
Apple	2010-16	5
Sheba Microsystems	2015-	25
LG Innotek	2020-	15
Varioptic/Corning	2002-	75
NextLens	2019-	15
LensVector	2006-15	85
Scope Photonics	2020-	1
Various (non-CML) SMA and related	2004-	40
CML	2002-	112
Total	2002-	918

Of the contenders in the above table, most have failed completely while several more are no longer directing their efforts at the handset camera market. The fact is that the only technology that has succeeded in making a dent in the pre-eminence of VCM in smartphone cameras is CML’s SMA.  A few further firms, notably poLight, NextLens and possibly MEMS Drive, have secured what is no more than a toehold in handsets.  Metalenz represents a genuine technological breakthrough but, as yet, it is being applied to 3D sensing and not to mainstream camera modules.

The final total reflects the magnitude of the resources committed to finding a better way of controlling lenses over a period of more than 20 years.  All in all, it is an exceedingly modest return for the approaching one billion dollars committed to solving “the smartphone lens challenge”.