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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.'""
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.