Wednesday, December 14, 2005
Breakthrough Chip - Better Pictures/Less Power
Posted by Suhit Gupta in "HARDWARE" @ 12:00 PM
"The next advance in cameras is becoming a reality at the University of Rochester. Imaging chips revolutionized the photography industry, and now the chips themselves are being revolutionized. A pair of newly patented technologies may soon enable power-hungry imaging chips to use just a fraction of the energy used today and capture better images to boot--all while enabling cameras to shrink to the size of a shirt button and run for years on a single battery. Placed in a home, they could wirelessly provide images to a security company when an alarm is tripped, or even allow mapping software like Google's to zoom in to real-time images at street level. The enormous reduction in power consumption and increase in computing power can also bring cell-phone video calls closer to fruition."
There are tons of technical details in the article; however, to summarize, most current chips are plagued with the problem of not having enough space on the CMOS to capture light and the technology proposed here reduces the number of transistors needed on the CMOS in order to create more surface area dedicated to the capture of light. They have also figured out a way to arrange photodiodes on an imaging chip so that compressing the resulting image demands as little as 1 percent of the computing power usually needed. Cool stuff, and of course I can see the voyeur world collectively rejoicing, :) but anyways, it is nice to see some innovation like this. No word on when this technology will make it to market.
There are tons of technical details in the article; however, to summarize, most current chips are plagued with the problem of not having enough space on the CMOS to capture light and the technology proposed here reduces the number of transistors needed on the CMOS in order to create more surface area dedicated to the capture of light. They have also figured out a way to arrange photodiodes on an imaging chip so that compressing the resulting image demands as little as 1 percent of the computing power usually needed. Cool stuff, and of course I can see the voyeur world collectively rejoicing, :) but anyways, it is nice to see some innovation like this. No word on when this technology will make it to market.
