Smartphone cameras are becoming smaller, yet photos are becoming sharper. Korean researchers have elevated the limits of next-generation smartphone cameras by developing a new image sensor technology that can accurately represent colors regardless of the angle at which light enters. The team achieved this by utilizing a “metamaterial” that designs the movement of light through structures too small to be seen with the naked eye.
KAIST (President Kwang Hyung Lee) announced on the 12th of February that a research team led by Professor Min Seok Jang of the School of Electrical Engineering, in collaboration with Professor Haejun Chung’s team at Hanyang, has developed a metamaterial-based technology for image sensors that can stably separate colors even when the angle of light incidence varies.
Conventional smartphone cameras capture images by concentrating light into a small lens. However, as camera pixels become extremely small, lenses alone struggle to gather sufficient light. To address this, the Nanophotonic Color Router was introduced. Instead of concentrating light through a lens, this technology uses microscopic structures invisible to the eye to precisely separate incoming light by color. By designing the pathways through which light travels, this metamaterial-based structure accurately divides light into red (R), green (G), and blue (B).
Samsung Electronics has already demonstrated the commercialization potential of this technology by applying it to actual image sensors under the name “Nano Prism.” Theoretically, stacking multiple layers of extremely fine nanostructures enables greater light collection and more accurate color separation.
However, existing Nanophotonic Color Routers had limitations. While they functioned well when light entered vertically, their performance deteriorated significantly—or colors mixed—when light entered at an angle, as is common in smartphone cameras. This issue, known as the “oblique incidence problem,” has been considered a critical challenge that must be resolved for real-world product applications.
The research team first investigated the root cause of this issue. They found that previous designs were overly optimized for vertically incident light, causing performance to drop sharply even with slight changes in the angle of incidence. Since smartphone cameras receive light from various angles, maintaining performance under angular variation is essential.
Instead of manually designing the structure, the team adopted an “inverse design” approach, which allows the computer to autonomously determine the optimal structure. Through this method, they derived a color router design capable of stable color separation even when the angle of incoming light changes.
As a result, whereas previous structures nearly failed when light was tilted by about 12 degrees, the newly designed structure maintained approximately 78% optical efficiency within a ±12-degree range, demonstrating stable color separation performance. In other words, the technology reaches a level suitable for practical smartphone usage environments.
The team further analyzed performance variations by considering factors such as the number of metamaterial layers, design conditions, and potential fabrication errors. They also systematically defined the limits of robustness against changes in the angle of incidence. This study is particularly meaningful in that it presents design criteria for color routers that reflect realistic image sensor environments.
Professor Min Seok Jang of KAIST stated, “This research is significant in that it systematically analyzes the oblique incidence problem, which has hindered the commercialization of color router technology, and proposes a clear solution direction,” adding, “The proposed design methodology can be extended beyond color routers to a wide range of metamaterial-based nanophotonic devices.”
In this study, KAIST undergraduate student Jaehyun Jeon and doctoral candidate Chanhyung Park participated as co-first authors. The research findings were published on January 27 in the international journal Advanced Optical Materials.
※ Paper title: “Inverse Design of Nanophotonic Color Router Robust to Oblique Incidence”
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/adom.202501697
※ Authors: Jaehyun Jeon (KAIST, first author), Chanhyung Park (KAIST, first author), Doyoung Heo (KAIST), Haejun Chung (Hanyang University), Min Seok Jang (KAIST, corresponding author)
This research was supported by the Ministry of Trade, Industry & Energy (Korea Institute for Advancement of Technology, Korea Semiconductor Research Consortium) under the project “Design Technology of Meta-Optical Structures for Next-Generation Sensors,” by the Ministry of Science and ICT (National Research Foundation of Korea) under the projects “Development of Full-Color Micro LED Devices and Panels Based on Beam-Steerable High-Color-Purity Meta Color Conversion Layers” and “Development of a Real-Time Zero-Energy Argos-Eye Metasurface Network Computing with All Properties of Light,” and by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism (Korea Creative Content Agency) under the project “International Joint Research for Next-Generation Copyright Protection and Secure Content Distribution Technologies.”