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CCD Image Sensor Inventors Win $500,000 Award
saskboy writes "CCD inventors were honoured this week. According to CBC News, "Willard Boyle, a Canadian scientist who helped invent the light-sensitive chip, accepted (the prestigious Charles Stark Draper Prize) in the U.S. on Tuesday. Boyle and George Smith will share the $500,000 US award for the invention of the "Charge-Coupled Device (CCD), a light-sensitive component at the heart of digital cameras and other widely used imaging technologies," the U.S. National Academy of Engineering said." Those other devices include the Hubble Space Telescope, and orthoscopic medical instruments. "Boyle and Smith came up with the idea for the device while working at Bell Laboratories in 1969. 'It was after maybe an hour's work,' Boyle recalled. 'We went over to the blackboard and we had some sketching there. We went down to our models lab and made one.'""
God bless Lucent and all that it brings.
that digital photography technology was originally developed for spy satellites and astronomy?
"He doesn't own a digital camera, saying things have gotten too complicated." Too funny! The inventor can use results of his invention!
Or maybe you're not aware that light sensitivity was considered a peculiar and irritating characteristic of some semiconductor memory. Not much of a problem inside an opaque case, unless nuclear decay or cosmic rays generate a photon...
Take a jar and fill it with marbles. At some point, there just isn't any way to fit more marbles into the jar without breaking either some of the marbles or the jar itself. Consider that between each marble is a little space left over. All that space is wasted, even though you can't fit any more marbles into the jar!
Now empty the jar and fill it with bread. Once the jar is full, you can press down on the top of the bread and make more room. In fact, you can pretty much keep stuffing bread into the jar for quite a long time. Eventually you'll reach the saturation point and no new bread can be entered into the jar. However, the amount of bread in the jar is many times greater than the number of marbles which we just removed. There was less space between each piece of bread than there was between each marble because the bread is malleable whereas the marble requires a fixed size.
There's a limit to the pixel density achievable with CCDs. Once the pixelsites get too close together, they interfere with each other electrically and throw off the sensor. CCDs are a nice stopgap measure, but they aren't the bread in the example above.
Having worked for a number of years in the optical astronomy field during the transition from photographic plates to CCD imaging I for one truly appreciate the CCD. No more baking plates in nitrogen and choosing the right emulsion for the wavelength of interest.
Now, the IR sensitivity was a different matter, played hob with the spectrograph we retrofitted with a CCD camera. First order IR overlapping second order blue.....
UNIX: 'cuz you can tattoo it on your knuckles!
Don't you get it....1969. Not yesterday, not the day before....1969. Most of you pups were still your dad's dreams if he was alive then.
I'm surprised it's taken this long to give them a prize.
For the $500k isn't it? I'm guessing he's made a lot more than that off the patents already for 37 some odd years.
...every other optical telescope in the world nowadays.
CCDs did more to revolutionize astronomy in the 20th century than the Hubble Space Telescope did. They enabled the HST, but also effectively multiplied the size of all ground-based telescopes by a factor of 10-- although it's not so simple as that, as CCDs provide a host of other advantages really making quantitative imaging possible.
CCDs were huge for astronomy. The "CCD revolution" in the 80's (at least 10 years before most people had really heard of digital cameras) made a big difference.
of his analogy.
1969. Back when we were building things. Inventing things. Making things better. We were actually investing in the future then.
Now it would require a "business case" before anyone would be allowed a moment to think about CCD image sensors, much less build them. Some rat fuck middle management asscrack would probably write the group up for "unauthorized use of business resources" and start drawing up requests for department-wide layoffs.
That's of course assuming brilliant people like these men who could "after maybe an hour's work, we went over to the blackboard and we had some sketching there. We went down to our models lab and made one" would get hired in the first place. They'd be declared "overqualified" or lacking "marketable skills" before they were even interviewed.
We were on the doorstep of the solar system almost 40 years ago. Now we're all parked in front of plasma televisions bought on 28% credit watching "reality shows." Talk about toilet-ramming the future. This is what happens when entire generations of education are wasted on purpose. What a fucking waste.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
Forgent was claiming their JPEG patent was violated with the invention of the CCD. That had to be cleared up before a prize could awarded, you see.
Did you mean arthroscopic? Or, more generally, endoscopic?
Of course, that was some orthoscopic fix on Hubble!
It's not as prevalent anymore; CMOS is gaining considerable ground in a lot of different imaging fields.
Canon, for example, uses CMOS sensors in all its digital SLRs; noise, power consumption, speed of "reading" the sensor (I think), and dynamic range are all much better. CMOS's only real technical downside is that there is a non-sensor component next to every sensor well. However, CMOS sensors are harder/more expensive to come by. They also aren't available as readily with cooling devices; a cooled CCD will have lower noise levels than a non-cooled CMOS sensor.
Canon did release a special version of the 20D for astrophotographers called the 20Da, with no IR filter...never heard how popular it was...
Please help metamoderate.
So these two men invented the CCD device that is the heart of every digital imaging device ever created. That would make them millionaires and quite possibly billionaires from royalties alone, so...why would anyone give them half a million dollars? They sure as hell don't need it.
I honestly can't figure out if you're serious or not. Probably doesn't help that you were modded insightful- now you seem to be moderated funny, but I suspect you were not trying to be...
What a bunch of crap. You're buying partially into the romanticization of historical inventors, and ignoring the fact that you only really hear about the people who were NOT shut down, the projects that were not abandoned because of penny pinchers, etc.
Talking about the "good old days" when inventors just picked money from trees, never had to justify research, didn't struggle against powermongering and corporate politics etc...is a bunch of pure, complete, uneducated, knee-jerk bullshit.
Please help metamoderate.
Someone mod this up insightful, the funny mark doesn't do it justice
It's like HP, their motto is "HP - Invent", that was 50 years ago, now they're a company that sells ink with region locked chips (this 'feature' may/may not be a reality... yet)
There is another kind of evil which we must fear most, and that is the indifference of good men. -- Boondock Saints
..... now picture that.
h ael/ScannerCamera/
h tml
my second thought was how.....well, the scanner camera...
http://www.interaction.rca.ac.uk/alumni/02-04/mic
http://www.rit.edu/~andpph/text-demo-scanner-cam.
pHaSeD ArRaY... New...but not as fattening.
No, they worked for Bell Labs. they are the ones raking in billions on patents. The pleb in the lab never cashes in when part of a big company.
Bell Lab a.k.a. Lucent got the rewards not these guys. Had this been the 90's they would have bolted and started a Silicon Valley start up...then they would have been mill....bill...zillonaires. These guys are getting ATT/B3ll Labs pensions...which isn't much.
Oddly enough ... a professor of mine (well -- talked at orientation, will probably later actually be one of my profs) gave this illustration as some sort of cornball illustration about "obviousness" (if I got the gist of it); basically, he filled a jar with large rocks, asked "Is the jar full?" Some students said Yes (which is true -- *in the sense that it was full of large rocks*); he proved 'em wrong by filling it with smaller rocks instead. Full? No, because there's still sand to go! (Though also true in the same sense as before -- "full of" requires a some standard of granularity; we're all just a little bit "full of it.") Full yet? No, because water is next! Finally full, to the audience's general satisfaction.
:)
..."
I wasn't sure what he was getting at; I pointed out that atoms (including those making up the molecules of water) are still mostly empty space. At this, he got a bit flustered, as if I'd shouted out the punchline to a joke he was still telling, but I wasn't trying to -- I figured that was the next Zen master step of his lesson about perceptions and truth
Oh, well. He just went on, with a snarky comment about "Ignoring Mr. Wizard back there
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Igor is overdue for the invention of the wheel 200,000 years ago.
Dry sand is heavier than wet sand, they say.
But if you take a jar packed with dry sand and pour water on it, you've added mass without adding volume to the contents of the jar. More mass means more weight, so the original postulate is incorrect.
honoured? Ohh, weit, /. spilling erorr, nevver mintt.
This invention really contributed to keeping the Cold War from heating up - reconnaissance satellites equipped with this technology were very useful to ensuring all sides kept their ends of the bargain during various arms control treaties. Not to mention their usefulness in charting maps and letting us all see from a new perspective.
It's kind of funny when you think about it, but this little invention has broadened our understanding of the entire universe while helping prevent us from blowing each other up down here on earth at the same time. You just can't say that about many things. Great work, gentlemen. Great work.
SIGN ME UP FOR THIS UNIVERSITY.... Maybe if I don't get in I can go to Bob Jones University.... Sounds like it's the way of the future
I seem to have forgotten, but I do recall reading somewhere about Ray Kurzweil's involvement in CCD scanning. I know he utilized the technology in his sight reading machines for the blind, and he made some sort of deal involving the scanning technology with Xerox. Anyone else remember this? I don't have my copy of The Age of Spiritual Machines handy.
"Every time a bell rings, a Dell laptop bursts into flame."
Hypering film requires a mixture of hydrogen and nitrogen to be pendantic about it:
http://www.astropix.com/HTML/I_ASTROP/I09/I09.HTM
Quite an art to get it right too.
A.C.
If they had gotten a restrictive corporation-style patent on that technology, they would have made billions of dollars. Sure, industry and inovation would be hampered, but that's a small price to pay for someone getting obscenely rich with money he couldn't spend in a donzen lifetimes...
I remember a vaguely similar demonstration involving a jar of marbles and some sand at school - except this one was part of a chemistry lesson. (I was probably only aged eleven or twelve at the time, so I think the teachers were still in the attempting-to-instil-wonder phase...)
;-)
Anyway. It was used as an analogy for the mixing of (I think) ethanol and water - take 10cm^3 of ethanol, 10cm^3 of water, mix 'em together and you get a bit less than 20cm^3 of liquid resulting.
It must have been a fairly early experiment, 'cause otherwise any teenage pupils would have drunk the ethanol. Yes, children, industrial alcohol contains methanol, and you will go blind if you do that...
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
Too bad the winners of American Idol will get more money and notoriety than these guys.
I wonder if the guys who invented the CMOS will also get a prize.
Comparison and history of both types of chips.
Surely your professor based his class on the old joke:
A professor stood before his philosophy class and had some items in front of him. When the class began, wordlessly, he picked up a very large and empty mayonnaise jar and proceeded to fill it with golf balls. He then asked the students if the jar was full. They agreed that it was.
So the professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured them into the jar. He shook the jar lightly. The pebbles rolled into the open areas between the golf balls. He then asked the students again if the jar was full. They agreed it was.
The professor next picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar. Of course, the sand filled up the remaining space. He asked once more if the jar was full. The students responded with an unanimous 'yes'.
The professor then produced two cans of beer from under the table and poured the entire contents into the jar, effectively filling the space between the sand particles. The students laughed.
Now, said the professor, as the laughter subsided, "I want you to recognize that this jar represents your life. "
"The golf balls are the important things - your family, your children, your health, your friends, your favourite passions - things that if everything else were lost, and only they remained, your life would still be full. The pebbles are the other things that matter like your job, your house, your car. The sand is everything else - the small stuff.
"If you put the sand into the jar first," he continued, "there is no room for the pebbles or the golf balls. The same goes for life. If you spend all your time and energy on the small stuff, you will never have room for the things that are important to you. Pay attention to the things that are critical to your happiness. Play with your children. Take your partner out to dinner. Go out with friends. There will always be time to clean the house and fix the washing. Take care of the golf balls first, the things that really matter. Set your priorities. The rest is just sand."
One of the students raised her hand and inquired what the beer represented.The professor smiled. "I'm glad you asked. It just goes to show you that no matter how full your life may seem, there's always room for a couple of beers."
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
1) Engineer a breakthrough in electronics
2) wait 37 years
3) profit!
You know... people don't need any help in fucking themselves over, but likely more often than you would think, they get more help with it than they need. Perhaps you've been lucky to avoid unethical, cold-hearted, racist and/or back-stabbing employers/managers/supervisors/co-workers, but just because you haven't run into them, it doesn't mean they don't exist.
Sometimes you eat the bar, sometimes the bar eats you.
I bet this guy uses a cell phone. Also the campus is probably surrounded by towers. These things are just as "dangerous" as WIFI. Not that there has ever been evidence to suggest that properly installed and used cellular technologies would cause problems anyway, but it is the same line of thought.
So, if televisions were being sold long before then, what sort of mechanism did they use to capture the frames of video and turn them into signals to broadcast to our TVs?
I've been wondering lately what it would take to convert a video camera pan into a stil picture.
If you were to scan a seen, zoomed in, and then process it, you should be able to get a HUGE picture with a fairly small camera.
This process would also stabilize the image, blurs don't exist on sufficiently fast movie cameras.
So thinking along those lines, any "Fuzzy" scene (like ANY zoomed-in scene that I try to shoot with a hand-held) should be able to be filmed as a video, then processed into something with much higher density simply due to your hand movements.
You are, in effect, filling in the space between the marbles.
The other really interesting effect that this kind of processing would give you is a 3-d effect with one camera.
Picture driving along with a movie camera pointed out your side window, preferably with a fish-eye lens. That lens captured all the images you need to re-create the entire trip in 3-d. As you approach a tree, it gets one side, as you drive away, it gets the other, all you would be missing is a small section of the back. All this would be in as high a resolution as you could possibly ask for.
Since the images would be so similar but 3-D separated, a computer shouldn't have too much trouble identifying different objects within the picture. The processing system would work pretty much the same as a video card running in reverse--take in a scene and put out a bunch of bitmap-textured 3-d models.
You score 3 out of 10 on the troll-o-meter ... way too obvious, but bonus points because you still somehow got quite a bunch of replies.
And how about getting off your ass and actually contributing something instead of wasting your time on a forum like /.
And how exactly do you know what GP is doing when not posting to slashdot? Oh, you don't you say? Then STFU.
With the KH-11's appearence in 1977, the CCD made a great leap forward in immediate intelligence gathering for the last 13 years or so of the Cold War - crucial years by anyone's standard.
The CCD wasn't the only imaging technology to be sure, but it made big contributions.
Thanks for your comment!
You insensitive klahd... I'm sitting on a *sofa* and I happen to also be sitting behind *two* keyboards listening to a web streamed simulcast of a concert in New Jersey (3000 miles away in meatspace) on one Linux box while recording the Olympics broadcast on my other Linux box, posting on /. and kicking back post work, having some supper.
Yeah, ok so its Friday of Mardi Gras weekend and I'm at home on the sofa reading ./, laughing at myself for busting out a moldy slashcliches (slashches?)... so what's my point?
Since when did posts need to have a point? Well I suppose it could be that the real world ain't 1's and 0's, $10k plasma screens @ 21% vs volunteering at Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems to develop a interdimensional attack & recreational device that runs Linux.
Apply some fuzzy logic y'all, ease back on the judgmentalism and ism throttle and reform yourselves a little bit.
Barton
Huh? Oh yeah, that.