Research + Development
Research + Development
NanoPixel®, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Lumenco, has a variety of intellectual property in fields including solar technology, screens, light management and diffusion and of course anticounterfeiting solutions.
The backbone of NanoPixel® Security Solutions consists of two distinct platforms: micro lenses and micro mirrors. Both platforms have issued patents in the United States, and several of the lens patents are issued in more than 30 countries.
The technologies share a scientific basis in light manipulation and were developed in ray tracing programs. In this case, all our ray tracing programs were written internally over a period of years and continue to evolve and develop.
Micro Mirror Technology
For instance, the micro mirror technology started with a desire to create effects in coins, evolved into labels and then into projection screens. Both lenses and mirror formations are designed, tested and optimized virtually using Lumenco’s custom ray tracing programs. This is a painstaking technical process that is started with a few rays, and then billions of rays are added to verify the results.
Production Tooling
Tools are created in grayscale lithography and then electroformed into nickel representing pixels at less than one micron and millions of mirrors in a square inch that are all unique and selected randomly in algorithms to create graphic solutions.
Finally, after extensive laboratory testing, production tooling is made at larger scale and then used in a roll to roll UV casting process as well as a chemical micro dye system used instead of printing. The results are technologies that cannot be reverse engineered or copied.