The industry’s most innovative people 2024 Lia Li
Organisation: Zero Point Motion Role: CEO Based in: Bristol, UK Education: PhD, Optomechanics, UCL
What are you currently working on? What will the impact be? The start-up I founded, Zero Point Motion, creates optical sensors that measure acceleration and rotation with 100x greater sensitivity than those currently inside your phone, car or game controllers. We combine tiny silicon mechanical structures with photonic cavity structures that are smaller than a piece of dust so that the optical resonances within the cavities detect the motion of the mechanical structures as they move in response to acceleration or rotation. The optical part is what makes our sensors exquisitely sensitive and the ability to mass produce both the photonics and mechanics from silicon wafers keeps them small, so they can be embedded into equipment, cars and wearables. The method we use is inspired by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave detector, which is the most sensitive human- made displacement detector on Earth! We get to harness that optical enhancement in a stamp-sized device. If we get the system architecture right
and get our costs down, it’ll have huge impact on the $16bn inertial sensing market as we’d bring a level of performance that was previously only accessible to defence or aerospace. We can bring confidence in decision-making for autonomous platforms and safer navigation when GPS is weakened or unavailable underground, within tunnels or indoors. Navigation can become faster for drones or delivery robots, reducing reliance on slow techniques that use cameras and lidar. For wearables, we enable sub-millimetre tracking and sub-pixel stabilisation, especially in the areas of augmented reality and gaming.
What was the most surprising thing you found in the course of your latest research? Our sensors rely on chipscale lasers that need to be co-packaged alongside our chips. Although laser technology has been around for many decades, the variety of laser flavours always surprises me, ranging from ultranarrow linewidth ones, to LEDs to SLEDs and also tunable lasers. Despite all these options, not many are qualified to operate uncooled in wide temperature ranges, such as those seen in automotive (-45°C to 105°C) and it still takes effort to stabilise them or manage heat dissipation. I think we are on the precipice of a new age of lasers being used in consumer applications
“The method we use is inspired by the LIGO detector, which is the most sensitive human- made displacement detector on Earth! We get to harness that optical enhancement in a stamp-sized device”
and wearables, propelled by the uptake of laser chips within smartphones, so I hope this drives maturity even faster.
What’s your biggest research priority in the coming year? Zero Point Motion is still pre-production so our key aims are to optimise and freeze our mechanical and photonic designs and then focus on increasing yield. Typically for MEMS you will aim for >90% yield, and applying this to the photonics side is going to be a challenge, since fabrication differences of a few nanometres across the wafer have an impact on performance. However, we are managing this by tailoring the design of our photonic structures to be less sensitive to fabrication imperfections.
In your opinion, what is the most significant photonics technology (other than one you have worked on) to emerge in the past 12 months and why? I’m really excited about optical computation using photonic integrated circuits (PICs) – although my company shares the same waveguide based building blocks, the way that academics and start-ups exploit light for computation is super-impressive and creative.
What are the biggest challenges or threats to the industry in the next 12 months? How can these be overcome? Photonics is now becoming part of mainstream consumer devices, with huge corporations like the smartphone players developing photonics R&D in-house. Although this is great for the commercial sector, we might see innovation stagnate within academic and start-up circles as information becomes more hidden or processes become proprietary.
Where can people find you online? Twitter: @OptoLia; LinkedIn:
www.linkedin. com/in/liayingli/
Where can people see you in person? SPIE Photonex, October 2023.
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