A revolutionary breakthrough is underway at Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering, an innovation that may usher in the next generation of light sensing technology with potential applications in scientific research and cellphone photography.
Thayer professor Eric Fossum -- the engineer and physicist who invented the CMOS image sensor used in nearly all cellphone and digital cameras, webcams, medical imaging and other applications -- joined with Thayer PhD candidate Jiaju Ma in developing pixels for the new Quanta Image Sensor (QIS).
The professor and student, who have worked on the project for more than three years, are co-inventors of the new pixel and co-authors of a paper on their invention in IEEE Electron Devices Letters. A PDF is available on request.
Their new sensor has the capability to significantly enhance low-light sensitivity. This is particularly important in applications such as "security cameras, astronomy, or life science imaging (like seeing how cells react under a microscope), where there's only just a few photons," says Fossum.
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