LEAD Smart glasses may need a new kind of display before they can become an everyday device. Swave Photonics is working on that challenge with holographic display technology on chip. Using Comsol simulation software, the Imec spinoff models how heat, materials and optical behavior interact before committing to expensive chip prototypes. A decade ago, augmented reality was widely seen as one of the next frontiers in consumer electronics. Companies explored holographic displays, 3D visualization and smart glasses, but the market never took off. The hardware wasn’t ready, the use cases were unclear and smartphones were still evolving fast enough to absorb most consumer attention. That balance is starting to shift. With smartphones now a mature platform and AI creating new ways to interact with digital information, companies are again looking at displays that can place images directly into the user’s field of view. For Swave Photonics, an Imec spinoff developing holographic display technology, that starts at the chip level. Diego Hoffman, director of physics at Swave Photonics, came to Belgium fifteen years ago for a job at Imec. There, he was involved in different projects around electronics and microchips. Five years ago, he worked on a project to create a spatial light modulator (SLM), a chip layer that controls how light is modified across many tiny pixels. When Imec established the spinoff Swave to further develop this technology, he joined this new start-up. Credit: Swave “Swave’s SLM layer has 16,000 by 16,000 pixels on a chip that’s about 5 by 5 millimeters,” Hoffman says. “The electronics layer tells the SLM how to shape the light field needed to produce a hologram.” The small size makes the chip usable for applications like smart glasses, which is currently the main market Swave is aiming for. They see momentum here, which was lacking a decade ago. Holographic images Conventional techniques present the augmented reality as a 3D image by showing each eye a slightly different 2D image. Those images are presented at a particular fixed distance. They trick the brain into thinking it’s farther away. If eyes try to focus on it, they converge as if the object is at one distance, while the lens has to focus on the fixed optical distance of the display. This creates a mismatch that the brain has to solve, which can lead to nausea, headaches, tiredness and limits how long you can wear the glasses. Swave intends to avoid this discrepancy by using holographic display technology. “To create a convincing holographic image, the chip has to control the light with enough precision for the eye to perceive depth in a natural way,” Hoffman explains. “The light behaves as if the object is there in space. So when you focus on it, the discrepancy the 2D images give won’t be there.” The holographic images are created by local heating that changes how individual pixels modulate the light, allowing the chip to shape the light field seen by the user. These pixels operate at the nanoscale, which means the chip that produces the images needs to be very precise in where to send the heat. Designing such a chip by trial and error would be slow and expensive. Each physical iteration requires a new chip design to be fabricated and tested, making it impractical to explore hundreds of possible geometries, materials and thermal strategies in hardware. To shorten that cycle, Swave uses simulation to predict how design choices will affect the behavior of the SLM layer before a prototype is made. Bits&Chips’ Dutch state of semicon 2026 This article is part of the Bits&Chips special edition on the Dutch state of semicon, published on 23 October 2026. Order your hard copy of the special at info@techwatch.nl. Design questions Nano-pixel technology developers have relied on Comsol for those simulations for more than a decade. The software allows the team to narrow down the most promising designs before committing to a costly fabrication run to verify the results t