Japanese invent fast, sensitive digital image maker
5 Feb 2008 | 12:22 GMT
No, not Max Clifford
THE PROBLEM with digital cameras is that annoying...[Oh, for god’s sake] ...delay. We’ve all tried to snap a local celebrity as they pass us on the street, only to watch them thundering off into the distance while our annoying little gadget is still catching its breath.
You don’t know how many times I’ve tried to get a decent picture of our local celebrity (see picture). But my Sony Cybershot, funky and modern as it sounds, couldn’t keep up with a microscooting octagenarian. So eventually, to get this picture, I had to run into the street and stop her.
The days of having to waylay old ladies in the street could be over now, thanks to the Japanese National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology and a company called Rohm, reports nikkei.net.
They’ say they've jointly developed a new image sensor that has over six times the sensitivity of a conventional silicon-based device. So it detects light across a broader spectrum.
And it boosts the shutter speed of digital cameras. Another bonus is that it offers the kind of night time vision useful for monitoring cameras and car-mounted safety systems.
They make this new image sensor by layering a thin film of copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) above the silicon substrate that forms the base of the circuitry. CIGS is now being developed for solar cells and can detect light with twice the sensitivity of silicon. The sensor has been designed to allow 90 per cent of the surface to detect light, which triples the normal capacity. Ultimately that means six times the sensitivity.
The new image sensor detects visible light equally as well as a typical silicon-based device, but trounces it on near infrared light detection, going up to a wavelength of 1,300 nanometers.
Rohm and the institute have a 100,000-pixel sensor-on-a-chip prototype, which is 7.5mm square. The bad news is, we’ll have to wait two or three years for the end product to emerge.
I can’t wait that long. Why doesn’t someone invent a mobile phone that uses film? Come on Nokia, what are you waiting for? µ
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