San Juan Capistrano, CA-based Semiconductor Technology Associates (STA) has designed the world's highest-resolution digital camera chip, capable of holding an image composed of more than 111 million pixels. By comparison, the best consumer cameras take shots of 12 to 16 million pixels, and an average computer monitor offers about one million pixels.

The imaging chip, which is a charge-coupled device (CCD), was designed for use in telescope cameras that map stars and ever-moving objects in the solar system, says Richard Bredthauer, STA's president. But this large-scale chip -- it measures four inches square -- could be useful in more fields than just astronomy, he says, including high-resolution microscopic images of proteins, military surveillance applications, and even civilian mapping projects that require detailed aerial photography.

Currently, most large-scale digital photographs are either taken by arrays of smaller CCDs connected together, or created by stitching together hundreds of images. With arrays, the quality of each part of the picture can vary because each CCD might have been manufactured under slightly different circumstances. Additionally, assembling an array of multiple CCDs can be expensive and complicated. With the stitching method, the lighting in the pictures changes over time, since it can take from minutes to hours to collect enough pictures for a large-scale panorama. The 100-megapixel CCD (a mega pixel is one million pixels) doesn't have these drawbacks, and could also potentially be cheaper to manufacture, since a single chip could give the same resolution as many arrayed chips, says Robert Groulx, CCD product manager at Dalsa Semiconductor, the Ontario-based foundry where the chip was manufactured.

The reason such a large CCD was achievable, says Bredthauer, is in part due to the same advances in semiconductor fabrication that have crammed more transistors into microprocessors and memory chips, such as in photolithography, the technology used to pattern smaller and smaller transistors on a chip. A CCD device is made using the same processing steps and materials -- silicon, silicon dioxide, and aluminum -- as microprocessors and flash memory, differing only in the design of the circuitry on the chip. "CCD imagery has been following on the coattails of [the semiconductor] industry," Bredthauer says.