Ultra-Thin Camera Creates Images without Lenses

Megalith

Megalith

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I suppose this is great news for smartphone makers struggling to make even thinner devices and avoiding the dreaded camera bump: Caltech engineers have created an ultra-thin optical phased array that can bend and focus light just like a traditional lens can. The layer, comprising “integrated silicon photonics,” is capable of switching from a fish-eye to telephoto lens instantaneously.

Traditional cameras - even those on the thinnest of cell phones - cannot be truly flat due to their optics: lenses that require a certain shape and size in order to function. At Caltech, engineers have developed a new camera design that replaces the lenses with an ultra-thin optical phased array (OPA). The OPA does computationally what lenses do using large pieces of glass: it manipulates incoming light to capture an image.
 
Privacy is now obsolete unless you choose to not participate in modern society; which is getting more difficult to do all the time.
 
Dr. Righteous said:
Camera without a lense? You mean a pinhole camera??
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Its different from that. Its a phased array of sensors on a chip directly exposed to light + really clever math to generate an image from the raw mess you get from the sensor.
 
If they can control the driver electronics to process the resolution of light at the femto second range, whats preventing them from useing some of that technology to shorten the path of signals in our computers. We measure really fast computer events at the pico second range. A femto second is 1000 times faster. Bet the computer industry could get use of a femto second wayyyy faster than a proof of technology demostration. Memory access at the femto second range would put to shame optane. But killer would be "Femtotane". Non volitale memory faster than cache ram. We can only hope that there is some kind of dissemination of femto tech. Spread the love.
 
Khahhblaab said:
If they can control the driver electronics to process the resolution of light at the femto second range, whats preventing them from useing some of that technology to shorten the path of signals in our computers
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<fatherted>The chip here is small, but the busses between chips there are far away</fatherted>

The femtosecond timing used here is because the timings are pre-set, you take many, many, many femotoseconds to tell all the elements "OK, you log the magnitude at this point in the phase of the global clock", then the actual femotsecond timing is only relative to the non-femtosecond clock trigger.

It's a similar 'trick; to how the Kinect 2's phase-based time-of-flight camera can capture picosecond differences in light transmission without the absurdly fast and rapidly sampling response of a 'true' time-of-flight camera: you use phase difference.
 
Great, so they can cut battery size some more, while claiming more power efficiency from other 'improvements' so its always less than a day without recharge if usage is of any significance...
 
So it sounds like the current proof-of-concept only has a 64 pixel sensor.

Call me when this gets up past 16MP size.
 
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