Rockley unveils new chip for wearable health monitoring

Rockley Photonics Holdings Limited (Rockley), a provider of photonics-based health monitoring and communications solutions, has developed a micro-transfer-printed (mTP) silicon-photonics-based laser for commercial applications. This achievement is expected to allow Rockley to further increase the density and reduce the size of its high-density spectrophotometer chips, which are smaller in area than LED-based solutions currently used in wearables.

This advancement could have a significant impact across a range of applications, including the design of small wearable devices for the detection and measurement of multiple biomarkers. New silicon-photonics-based biosensing chips using mTP technology are expected to be available in the first half of 2024. With this development in the mTP of silicon-photonics-based lasers, Rockley has increased the laser density of its photonics integrated circuits (PICs) for biosensing, creating a high-density broad-wavelength laser spectrophotometer chip. The mTP process is expected to reduce manufacturing costs and enable thinner, smaller footprint and higher-density chip designs. These attributes are powerful benefits for use in consumer and medtech devices and could facilitate the integration of Rockley’s biosensing technology into future tiny wearables.

Leveraging the mTP process, the new PIC technology will integrate a laser-generating ‘membrane’ with a thickness of four microns. The potential applications for this higher-density and smaller-footprint chip technology extend beyond biosensing and health monitoring into other areas, such as ultra-small wearables, clothing, or XR/VR/AR headsets and glasses. The mTP development is the result of Rockley’s partnership with the Tyndall National Institute at University College Cork in Ireland, X-Celeprint Limited, and the Irish Photonics Integration Centre (IPIC), with funding support from the Irish Government’s Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) and Disruptive Technologies Innovation Fund (DTIF).

The project started five years ago with a focus on developing a custom mTP process for Rockley’s silicon photonics platform and has involved a multidisciplinary team of engineers and researchers. This technology, along with many other Rockley innovations, is backed by a multidisciplinary patent portfolio of over 200 issued patents and 295 pending patents in total. Dr Andrew Rickman, chairman and CEO of Rockley, said that applying the micro-transfer printing process to the production of integrated lasers is a breakthrough that will have a tremendous impact on wearable biosensing and on the photonics industry as a whole. “We arguably have some of the most sophisticated photonics technology in the world, and this unprecedented level of miniaturisation raises the bar even further. By creating biosensing chips that are smaller, lower-cost, and more efficient, we can continually improve our wearable biosensing products and deliver novel, relevant and more powerful ways to monitor our health,” Rickman said.

Aaron Zilkie, Chief Technology Officer of Photonics at Rockley, said that this next-gen, heterogeneous integration platform will lead to several significant technological advancements, including higher densities of layers, increasingly small chip sizes, and ultra-high-volume manufacturing. “The team has been working on this project for years, and we are extremely excited to have reached this important milestone. We are grateful for the close collaboration we’ve had with our research partners and for the funding support from the Irish Government and its Science Foundation Ireland and Disruptive Technologies Innovation Fund,” Zilkie said.

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