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The other half of this year's Nobel Prize in physics goes to the inventors of the CCD, a device that converts images into electrical signals, thereby revolutionizing photography and digital imaging.
While Kao's work grew out of a concerted effort to find a better telecommunications medium, Boyle and Smith's was unanticipated. They developed the CCD at Bell Labs in 1969, after having sketched out the basic design during an hour-long brainstorming session. The principle behind the CCD is the photoelectric effect, which was in part theorized by Albert Einstein, earning him the Nobel Prize in 1921. When bombarded by a photon, some materials emit an electron. Boyle and Smith's design is a silicon chip whose surface is covered with a grid of capacitors that store the electrons created when the chip is illuminated. Each capacitor is a pixel. The number of electrons stored at each capacitor is proportional to the intensity of the light in that part of the image. The image can be read out by pulling the charges off the CCD.
The advantage of the CCD over light-sensitive chemical films and even the human eye is its high sensitivity. Over the entire spectrum of light, from infrared to x-rays, CCDs can capture 90 percent of incoming photons. The eye or a film camera captures only 1 percent of these photons.
A year after their invention, Boyle and Smith made a video camera based on the digital-image sensor; in 1981 Sony brought to market the first CCD camera, the Mavica. Astronomers were early adopters and have used the sensors to capture images of distant celestial objects that were heretofore invisible.
Today the CCD faces some competition from another digital-imaging chip invented around the same time--CMOS (complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor). Both devices rely on the photoelectric effect. While the CCD directs electrons off the chip in a single stream to be read out, data from CMOS pixels are read out on site, which saves power and prolongs battery life. However, CMOS is not as sensitive as CCD, which still has advantages for advanced applications like astronomy and medical imaging.
Embedding microlenses in thin films could bring 3-D movies and games to mobile devices.
Three chemists are honored for discovering and developing a glowing jellyfish protein.
Findings transformed storage and could pave the way for new devices.
These are two huge discoveries that have had a major impact on peoples lives.
While in related fields, they are quite different, and could have merited one Physics prize for each discovery.
Well they both are genius and They also expand the knowledge regarding physics and this innovation is useful in future.
Manufacturing in the United States is in trouble. That's bad news not just for the country's economy but for the future of innovation.
This document is part of the “How-To Guide for Most Common Measurements” centralized resource portal. This tutorial provides a detailed guide for measurement and device considerations to take temperature measurements using thermocouples. Get an introduction to thermocouples, which are inexpensive sensing devices widely used with PC-based data acquisition systems. Also review some specific thermocouple examples and learn how thermocouples work and ways to integrate them into a data acquisition measurement system.
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Mapou
357 Comments
Nice Article
Very nicely written article. Thank you. Those guys surely deserve the Nobel Prize and more. Where would we be without their pioneering research? Congratulations to the new laureates.
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dtutelman
117 Comments
Re: Nice Article
That's a very good point. Because that pioneering research is not supported as it once was.
Look at where the CCD came from -- along with two other devices, the transistor and the laser, mentioned in the article but recognized previously with their own Nobels. All three emerged from a Bell Labs that no longer exists. I'm not just saying that Bell Labs is no more; the environment that allowed the inventions of the CCD, the laser, and the transistor was gone from the Labs long before Bell Labs itself was gone.
Bell Labs' involvement with optical fibers is closer to the best we can expect of industrial labs today. The fundamental research was done by Kao at STL. Bell Labs' contribution came afterwards, making the manufacture of fiber practical. The Bell Labs of today (and even 25 years ago) would never have tried to do the Kao work. "99% attenuation at 20 meters? Skip it; we'll do something else." But 40-50 years ago (when Kao, Boyle, and Smith did their Nobel-winning work), the attitude would have been, "Let's ask a small, young, smart team to see how fundamental that limitation is." Or even, "These guys want to see how fundamental that limitation is. Let's fund them."
What has changed? The entire business, social, and political spectrum. But it mostly boils down to the expectation of short-term return on investment. Fundamental research, with its uncertain payback and long payback times, cannot be supported by industry any more. It tends to be limited to universities today.
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nluco
2 Comments
Re: Nice Article
As a journalist, I have just been exposed to Alcatel - Lucent executives bragging about Bell Labs remaining in their organization, the number of patents in 2008, the amount of scientists... Did not seem such a landslide. But the damage the demand for short term results is causing is universal. Your comment also pounds on the demand upon universities' researchers, they have a difficult political task of convincing their funding agencies that "to know" is a good cause. And I am writing from Chile.
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