Meta’s Orion AR glasses prototype is expensive to make—like $10,000 per pair, expensive. Orion’s most pricey component is undoubtedly its custom silicon carbide waveguide lenses, although Meta says it sees a pathway to “significantly reduce the cost” of that key component in the future.
Silicon carbide has been around for a while, having mostly been used as a substrate for high-power chips, owing to its better power efficiently and lower heat output. Unlike silicon, silicon carbide is much more difficult to manufacture though, with challenges stemming from its material properties, crystal growth process, and fabrication complexity.
Electric vehicles are leading the way in decreasing costs, however it’s still far from reaching price-parity with the cheap and plentiful silicon-based equivalents. Another use case could involve quantum computing, although that comes with its own unique challenges separate from what Meta hopes to do with the next-gen material.
It’s not silicon carbide’s better power efficiency and lower heat output that Meta is after though. It’s the material’s high refractive index, making it ideal to provide clear, wide field-of-view (FOV) waveguides suitable for AR glasses, like the class-leading 70-degree FOV seen in Orion. And the difference between conventional multi-layered glass waveguides and Orion’s silicon carbide-base waveguides is—for the few that have tried it—night and day.
“Wearing the glasses with glass-based waveguides and multiple plates, it felt like you were in a disco,” says Optical Scientist Pasqual Rivera in a blog post. “There were rainbows everywhere, and it was so distracting—you weren’t even looking at the AR content. Then, you put on the glasses with silicon carbide waveguides, and it was like you were at the symphony listening to a quiet, classical piece. You could actually pay attention to the full experience of what we were building. It was a total game changer.”
Many of the world’s top electric vehicle manufactures have adopted chips based on silicon carbide in recent years, which has helped drive the price down. Giuseppe Calafiore, Reality Lab’s AR Waveguides Tech Lead, notes “there’s an overcapacity [thanks to EVs] that didn’t exist when we were building Orion. So now, because supply is high and demand is low, the cost of the substrate has started to come down.”
Notably, silicon carbide wafers used in EVs aren’t optical-grade, as they prioritize electrical performance over optical clarity, so coopting any EV chip surplus is out of the question. Still, Reality Labs’ Director of Research Science Barry Silverstein sees a path forward:
“Suppliers are very excited by the new opportunity of manufacturing optical-grade silicon carbide—after all, each waveguide lens represents a large amount of material relative to an electronic chip, and all of their existing capabilities apply to this new space. Filling your factory is essential, and scaling your factory is the dream. The size of the wafer matters, too: The bigger the wafer, the lower the cost—but the complexity of the process also goes up. That said, we’ve seen suppliers move from four-inch to eight-inch wafers, and some are working on precursors to 12-inch wafers, which would yield exponentially more pairs of AR glasses.”
“The world is awake now,” adds Silverstein. “We’ve successfully shown that silicon carbide can flex across electronics and photonics. It’s a material that could have future applications in quantum computing. And we’re seeing signs that it’s possible to significantly reduce the cost. There’s a lot of work left to be done, but the potential upside here is huge.”
This wouldn’t be the first time XR headsets have directly benefitted from larger, more consumer-oriented industries taking the lead. In the early 2010s, small, low-cost displays developed for smartphones were a key driver in kickstarting the consumer VR headset revolution. For example, if you’ve ever cracked open an Oculus Rift DK2, released in 2014, you’ll find a Galaxy Note 3 display panel at its core—Samsung branding and all.
That’s not to mention a host of other components that have been lifted from the smartphone parts bin over the years, including inertial measurement units (IMUs), camera sensors, and battery technology. The parallels are there, although it seems leveraging the silicon carbide wins spurred by the EV boom still won’t be nearly as straight forward in AR glasses.
While suppliers are eyeballing photonics-grade silicon carbide, it’s still a niche within a niche that will take years to scale up. It’s effectively one of the main reasons Meta can’t productize Orion today. That said, Meta is using Orion as an “internal developer kit” of sorts as its hopes to produce a pair of consumer AR glasses sometime before 2030, priced somewhere near “phone, laptop territory,” Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth revealed in September.
Still, with such massive potential for consumer appeal, these puzzle pieces will fit together somehow. Companies like Meta, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Qualcomm all hope to own their own slices of the next dominant mobile computing platform, which aims to replace smartphones entirely.
