clinical spectrometer into a wearable chip that could be carried on your wrist. This enables continuous monitoring of numerous biomarkers, some of which are life critical such as hydration, blood pressure, core body temperature, lactate, and glucose levels for the first time ever. Our technology is up to 1,000,000x more accurate than existing LEDs you see in high-end smartwatches today. There is no precedent for this type of exponential increase in accuracy in recent history, and we have patents and process technology that form a protective moat around our business.
It is the power of this technology that we believe has made us invaluable to one of the largest technology companies in the world. They believe in us and in our technology and have invested a significant amount of non-recurring revenue, or NRE, in us. You could see this revolutionary technology on your wrist as soon as next year, followed by a significant volume ramp in 2023. As AJ mentioned, this is not a future story – this is happening now, and we have strong visibility on our numbers in close partnership with our customers.
Before starting on slide 8, let me tell you about my background and the background to Rockley’s sensing platform, which is based on silicon photonics. Silicon photonics is the optical analogy of microelectronics; we’re creating complex systems on a chip which uses photons instead of electrons to process and sense information. The idea of silicon photonics was proposed in the mid-1980s, and some years later I founded the first silicon photonics company to commercialize the field. That company was called Bookham, it was backed by Intel and Cisco, and we took it public on the Nasdaq. The company went on to be known as Oclaro and now is part of Lumentum. I chaired a second company in the field called Kotura, which had a similar journey in fiber optic communications with a second-generation process, and we successfully sold it to Mellanox in 2013, which in turn was acquired by NVIDIA last year. That’s when we started Rockley.
The aim of Rockley was to develop a third-generation silicon photonics process that overcame the remaining hyperscale manufacturing issues and provided a wider breadth of performance capabilities compared to current processes. We also saw that there were going to be new market applications that were bigger and more disruptive, the largest one being created by the advent of smartwatches. Smartwatches have LEDs that shine light into your skin, monitoring the scattered light that comes back to measure your pulse and, in the high-end versions, your blood oxygen. With this market taking off, it created a new opportunity for us to exploit an idea we had many years back to create a much more powerful optical sensing chip for non-invasive biomarker monitoring.
As of today, Rockley has developed a unique sensing platform targeting applications in consumer health and wellness, driving an exponential increase in application capabilities for non-invasive, multi-model biomarker monitoring. This is built on our highly disruptive silicon photonics technology platform, which delivers compelling sensor performance, power, resolution, and density. Our spectrometer chip provides up to 1,000,000x higher resolution, 1,000x higher accuracy and 100x broader bandwidth than LED technology on existing wearables today.
Another way of looking at our technology is that we’ve shrunk a laboratory spectrometer onto a chip, creating a “clinic on a wrist”. Traditionally, when you shrink an optical instrument, the performance generally gets worse as you get less light into the device. But in this particular case, the innovative architecture we’ve designed allows our device to actually have two orders of magnitude improvement over the benchtop instrument. So this is not an average spectrometer, this is a highly advanced spectrometer.