Designing Optical Metasurfaces: Principles to Production

Metasurfaces have come a long way from small lab demos to now being used in smartphones and other consumer electronics. With this maturing of the industry, optimism and hype have transformed into a more productive understanding of what metasurfaces are good at, and the drawbacks. In this webinar the design steps to making manufacturable metasurfaces for practical applications will be shown. Penninck covers metasurface design from the basic principles and how to design nanostructures to integrating them into a system in manufacturable designs.

Metasurfaces offer a pathway to functionalities that were out of reach for well-known refractive and reflective optics. Careful design of sub-wavelength structures allows the creation of systems that are smaller, lighter, and manufacturable with semiconductor processes. But nothing is perfect, and successful design requires balancing trade-offs in the system.

This presentation explores how multi-scale physics are used to be able to co-design from the nanoscale with full wave solvers up to components with millions of structures to system of multiple components.

About the presenter
Lieven Penninck, Ph.D., is an expert on optical modelling methods focusing on metasurfaces and nanophotonics. In 2019 he founded PlanOpSim to develop and offer numerical simulation software for the design of metasurfaces, metalenses, and planar optics.

Aside from software development, PlanOpSim also provides optical design services to the photonics and optics industry. He holds a doctorate in photonics engineering from Ghent University on development of simulation methods for OLED and liquid crystal devices.

Outside of academia, he worked on LCD display research & development, along with simulation and measurement of OLEDs and solar cells in various roles.