The San Diego electronics giant sells cameras, TVs and headphones at retail - and makes the tiny CMOS sensor behind most premium phone cameras. Here is how one company ended up on both sides of the counter.
Swave Photonics is a Belgium-based fabless semiconductor company building the world's first true holographic display chip. Spun out of imec and Vrije Universiteit Brussel in 2022, Swave's Holographic eXtended Reality (HXR) platform uses a CMOS spatial light modulator with sub-300nm 'Diffraction Pixels' to sculpt light into natural 3D images - aiming to replace the waveguides and varifocal lenses in AR glasses, heads-up displays and glasses-free 3D walls with a single scalable chip.