TECH

Scientists at Princeton and Washington Universities have developed a miniature camera the size of a grain of salt

Their modest dimensions do not prevent you from obtaining high-resolution color images and, in the future, it will be possible to create entire surfaces of such cameras.

The camera is a transparent panel with a kind of circular engraving. In reality, this circle with a diameter of about 0.5 mm contains 1.6 million cylinders. Each of them is uniquely shaped and works like an optical antenna – together they form an optical wavefront. Then, using an artificial intelligence algorithm, the system composes an image. The result is a higher quality image than the image of existing miniature sensors.

After the test, the project authors received an image with a resolution of 720 × 720 pixels in color – with wavelengths from 400 to 700 nm, which corresponds approximately to the visible spectrum. The spatial resolution of the image was 214 pairs of lines per 1 mm at a 40° viewing angle. According to the researchers, similar indicators are demonstrated by common modern cameras, which are half a million times larger than their imagination.

The main advantage of the solution is the relative simplicity of manufacturing these cameras. They are made of silicon nitride, and the nanostructures used in the project can be obtained through DUV literography, widely used in the manufacture of semiconductor products. In practice, these cameras can be used not only in medicine, where compact dimensions are needed, but also in any other area: the head of the group of scientists, Felix Heide, said that the meta-surface technology they developed makes it possible to rotate in a camera. , more precisely, a set of cameras, virtually any surface. So smartphones don't need more than three or four cameras, because the entire back cover of a device can become one giant camera. 

Source:engineering.princeton.edu