Iris Light Technologies

Iris Light Technologies develops opto-electronically active nanomaterials, marketed under the NanoBLACK trademark, intended to bring on-chip light sources and other components that are difficult to integrate into mainstream semiconductor manufacturing. The materials are formulated as tunable "photonic inks" engineered for compatibility with existing silicon manufacturing workflows, with the goal of enabling on-chip lasers and LEDs, integrated photodetectors, and image sensors at production scale.

The core material is black phosphorus (BP), a layered two-dimensional, monoelemental semiconductor with a direct bandgap that can be tuned by layer thickness across roughly 0.3 eV to 2 eV, covering the visible through mid-infrared. The company notes that direct bandgaps are typically required for high-performance lasers, LEDs, and photodetectors, while many other 2D semiconductors are spectrally limited by indirect bandgaps beyond a few atomic layers. BP is reactive in ambient conditions without encapsulation; the company states it uses controlled-environment processing and hermetic packaging techniques analogous to those applied to GaAs and InP.

Product directions described by the company include integrated nanomaterial photodetectors with broadband response from the visible into the extended short-wave infrared (SWIR), CMOS-compatible and non-toxic nanomaterial SWIR image sensors, and integrated photonic frequency combs. The company frames the SWIR market problem as one of wafer economics: visible imagers benefit from silicon CMOS and high-volume wafer production, whereas SWIR devices rely on small wafer formats and more exotic production methods, resulting in high cost and limited deployment. Iris Light positions wafer-scale integration of SWIR materials directly onto silicon as a route to higher-volume "SWIR-on-Si" sensors.