By Kristopher Benke
Keiko Munechika originally came to the Molecular Foundry as a post-doc, where she was recruited to work for aBeam Technologies, a company that delivers simulation and patterning solutions for semiconductor and nano-scale manufacturing. Her work at the Foundry enabled her to spin off the Nanofabrication and nano-Optics division of aBeam into its own company, HighRI Optics, where she is now the CEO. HighRI Optics makes materials with the highest refractive index available, and Keiko tells us how the company is transforming them into functional materials that go into high-performance technologies, like augmented reality glasses and micro optical structures necessary to power AI.
Tell me a little about what your company does.
We are HighRI Optics, so as the company name suggests, we are named after what we started working on at aBeam and continued developing as one of our main commercial targets. That’s the high refractive index polymers and optical materials, and they’re used for lenses and sensor materials that would be a part of displays for augmented reality glasses and goggles. They have many applications, but they are one of the key enablers of these devices for improving efficiency and performance and reducing the cost of fabrication.
What makes us unique is that we have the highest refractive index–typically the higher, the better–and it’s our patented and proprietary polymer formulation that gives the best performance so far. That’s the company in a nutshell.
Can you tell me more about how these high refractive index materials work in devices?
For augmented reality, how wide you see depends on the refractive index. People are looking for higher index materials in CMOS sensors, and these days we have smaller and smaller pixels, so you really need to have smaller lenses to avoid crosstalk between pixels.
The refractive index of a material directly correlates with the device performance. You have sensors that you need to collect more light, which means you need to go to a higher refractive index than what is usually used.
Another example would be glasses–if you have a very high prescription and you’re nearsighted, you wear glasses, but with the higher refractive index lenses that are available commercially, you can go thinner. So we can make thinner and more efficient devices.
Current materials are reaching their performance limits, which is why major CMOS manufacturers are seeking higher refractive index alternatives. In the communications space, companies like Nvidia are pursuing photonic integration to enable more efficient light-based data transmission. With the explosion of data usage driven by ChatGPT and AI applications, co-packaged optics have emerged as a key piece of the puzzle—and this technology also relies on higher refractive index materials to use light more efficiently. These are some of the usage cases that we are directly in communication with for potential users.
What question did you originally come to the Molecular Foundry to answer?
One of our initial questions was whether we could make our material patternable. Can we make structures? Not just the thin films of material, but can we pattern them in the way that provides function? Because that’s what some of the users want to do. We have this material, and we can show data, but we can only go so far without further testing. We needed to show that we can actually structure this into a lens shape, or we can make functioning devices out of it. We lacked actual fabrication, so that’s where the Molecular Foundry came in.
What originally brought you to the Foundry? Were you considering other ways to answer the questions you had about your material?
I was here as a postdoc, so we knew what was possible. With that confidence, we thought, okay, we can actually show this because of what we can do at the Foundry. I knew the capabilities here and put the two pieces together.
HighRI Optics has access to rental lab space elsewhere, but what makes the Foundry truly unique is the ability to collaborate directly with its experienced staff. Being able to discuss challenges and ideas with the Foundry team significantly accelerated our development timeline. We also co-developed novel technology with the Foundry and published the results together.
What was your experience working with the staff at the Foundry?
The Foundry staff are incredibly smart people and well connected, so if we have a problem–or sometimes don’t even realize there’s a problem–we talk to the staff scientists and realize we need to be thinking another way. Being able to talk to the staff scientists is invaluable here at the Foundry.
For example, maybe you have this confusing technology and there are many things that need to be resolved. If you’re just an independent company working in your own facility, you may not have that specific expertise. Then you think, maybe we should be tackling the problem in a different way, and if you do not have a way of accessing that, sometimes you don’t solve the problem. The Foundry scientists have a variety of experiences, and each of them is an expert in their own field. Just talking to them helped us make progress much faster than anywhere else.
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How did working at the Foundry influence the tools and equipment you ended up developing at your own facilities?
At the Foundry, we relied heavily on the nano imprinter, and our team gained a lot of knowledge in using it. We just set up a tool in our prototype space, and then were able to make improvements because now we really understand how it functions and how it needs to work.
As a small company, we don’t have half a million dollars just to spend on the tool. What we learned cumulatively over many years, we put into the tool at our prototype facility. It’s still not perfect, but it was a very smooth transition. We were able to get ahead of many, many, many problems because we were able to use the Foundry’s tool first.
How has your company changed since you first came to the Foundry? How has your work there continued since?
Since we first came to the Foundry, our company has grown from a small three-person team to a five-person organization with a much more mature technology base. The Foundry has remained the center of our most advanced—and often riskiest—material development and application research. After demonstrating feasibility there, we now transfer some of those processes to our external facility, produce samples, and gather feedback from potential users.
Over the years, the work we’ve done at the Foundry has significantly accelerated our progress, and the demonstrated results have helped us reach a stage where we are now in discussions with a potential manufacturing partner to scale production of our materials.
