Imec Spinoff Wants to Turn Every Phone into a Spectrometer

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Smartphone: a laboratory in your pocket?

www.eetimes.eu, Aug. 09, 2021 – 

Smartphones of the near future will be able to detect malignant melanoma from benign skin lesions. Spectricity, a spinoff of Imec (Interuniversity Microelectronics Center), claims it has developed chip-size hyperspectral sensor and imager solutions that could turn any smartphone into a real pocket lab.

"A camera phone can do more than just take a picture and could be used as a spectrometer to detect things you can't see with your eyes and things that are done by professional spectrometers," Vincent Mouret, CEO of Spectricity, told EE Times Europe. Such cameras with spectral analysis of the image can find applications in areas such as precision agriculture, food analysis, skin health, cosmetics, security and automotive.

Mechelen, Belgium-based Spectricity has just raised €14 million in a Series B funding to accelerate the development and volume production of its spectral sensing solutions for mass market mobile devices.

Wafer-scale filter

Spectricity's patented wafer-scale hyperspectral filter technology stems from over 10 years of research at Imec.

"Imec was building hyperspectral cameras and found a way to make them a lot smaller," Jonathan Borremans, cofounder and CTO of Spectricity, told EE Times Europe. "They were shipping hundreds of thousands of them, but we got a lot of requests from more companies looking for something 100 to 1000 times cheaper and they wanted to get it in millions of units. That's something Imec isn't set up for."

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