Posted on 05/31/2013 4:13:02 PM PDT by LibWhacker
Cameras fitted with a new revolutionary sensor will soon be able to take clear and sharp photos in dim conditions, thanks to a new image sensor invented at Nanyang Technological University (NTU).
The new sensor made from graphene, is believed to be the first to be able to detect broad spectrum light, from the visible to mid-infrared, with high photoresponse or sensitivity. This means it is suitable for use in all types of cameras, including infrared cameras, traffic speed cameras, satellite imaging and more.
Not only is the graphene sensor 1,000 times more sensitive to light than current imaging sensors found in today's cameras, it also uses 10 times less energy as it operates at lower voltages. When mass produced, graphene sensors are estimated to cost at least five times cheaper.
Graphene is only one-atom thick and is made of pure carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb structure. It is known to have a high electrical conductivity among other properties such as durability and flexibility.
The inventor of the graphene sensor, Assistant Professor Wang Qijie, from NTU's School of Electrical & Electronic Engineering, said it is believed to be the first time that a broad-spectrum, high photosensitive sensor has been developed using pure graphene.
His breakthrough, made by fabricating a graphene sheet into novel nano structures, was published this month in Nature Communications, a highly-rated research journal.
"We have shown that it is now possible to create cheap, sensitive and flexible photo sensors from graphene alone. We expect our innovation will have great impact not only on the consumer imaging industry, but also in satellite imaging and communication industries, as well as the mid-infrared applications," said Asst Prof Wang, who also holds a joint appointment in NTU's School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences.
"While designing this sensor, we have kept current manufacturing practices in mind. This means the industry can in principle continue producing camera sensors using the CMOS (complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor) process, which is the prevailing technology used by the majority of factories in the electronics industry. Therefore manufacturers can easily replace the current base material of photo sensors with our new nano-structured graphene material."
If adopted by industry, Asst Prof Wang expects that cost of manufacturing imaging sensors to fall - eventually leading to cheaper cameras with longer battery life.
How the Graphene nanostructure works
Asst Prof Wang came up with an innovative idea to create nanostructures on graphene which will "trap" light-generated electron particles for a much longer time, resulting in a much stronger electric signal. Such electric signals can then be processed into an image, such as a photograph captured by a digital camera.
The "trapped electrons" is the key to achieving high photoresponse in graphene, which makes it far more effective than the normal CMOS or CCD (charge-coupled device) image sensors, said Asst Prof Wang. Essentially, the stronger the electric signals generated, the clearer and sharper the photos.
"The performance of our graphene sensor can be further improved, such as the response speed, through nanostructure engineering of graphene, and preliminary results already verified the feasibility of our concept," Asst Prof Wang added.
This research, costing about $200,000, is funded by the Nanyang Assistant Professorship start-up grant and supported partially by the Ministry of Education Tier 2 and 3 research grants.
Development of this sensor took Asst Prof Wang a total of 2 years to complete. His team consisted of two research fellows, Dr Zhang Yongzhe and Dr Li Xiaohui, and four doctoral students Liu Tao, Meng Bo, Liang Guozhen and Hu Xiaonan, from EEE, NTU. Two undergraduate students were also involved in this ground-breaking work.
Asst Prof Wang has filed a patent through NTU's Nanyang Innovation and Enterprise Office for his invention.
The next step is to work with industry collaborators to develop the graphene sensor into a commercial product.
Sounds good, but still no color ....
Monochrome is the nature of the low-light beast.
Not gonna throw away my Nikon D4 just yet...
If this is manufacturable, I can see lots of applications. Imagine taking sports photos of a football catch with a phone, not a 2000$ camera with an $8,000 lens to gather enough light. Or, a 3” telescope taking images without a clock drive that would have taken a 100” telescope a half-hour to develop.
“Sounds good, but still no color ....”
CCD and CMOS sensors don’t detect colors, either. It’s done with on chip/off-chip filters. I don’t see why this won’t work the same way.
Maybe this will get us closer!
Yep, this should be a huge boon for astronomers and cosmologists; any telescope will suddenly be a 1,000 times more powerful.
Me thinks they are referring to the duration you can integrate the signal before reading it - which by itself is very useful.
*This is for "non-coherent" systems. Every application mentioned in the article supports this. Nothing in the article indicates otherwise.
And all for the price of a teeny tiny instantly rechargable battery about the size of a sugar snap pea ~ made out of junk.
I think I see where this is headed ~
Just occurred to me this will make invisibility cloaks quite affordable.
There is no color information when you are converting photons to electrons, right?
Add loss of freedom to your list. The intrusiveness of government placed night vision cameras will invade society beyond anyone’s dreams. Americans are already accepting a government that can destroy organizations through taxation, environment agencies that raid lawful businesses, spying on the press, targeting auditing to close business and silence critics, etc... What a scary world we live in. I do not welcome technology that can destroy privacy put in the hands a of a government intent on crushing freedom.
thanks to a new image sensor invented at Nanyang Technological University (NTU).
Nanyang Technological University (NTU)is located in Singapore, They will probably share the invention with the ChiComs.
it also uses 10 times less energy
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Is this to say that it creates energy?
Well duh! How else would our military be able to buy them?
Depends on what you mean by "convert." Photons have subjective color information from their capture scenario. Whether that information gets converted into the resulting electron stream data is up to the conversion process.
Well that will end the Night UFO flights!
As moper people have HD cams on them 24/7 the Alines shifted thier flights to night.
Now they have to stop altogether!
Even the Chupacabara and Big Foot wil also have to make adjustments to their patterns.
Let's keep it simple. The typical photodetector will release an electron whenever a photon of sufficient energy (>= "work function") bangs into it, knocking out an electron. The energy of the photon is directly proportional to its frequency = color. Therefore, to discriminate color with these type of detectors you put an optical color filter in front of each pixel that passes either Red, Green, or Blue. By knowing which detector pixel had which filter color, you can recreate the original image in RGB, which is how the human eye works. So while the color LOOKS very good there is actually a tremendous loss of spectral information occurring.
Moreover, most color cameras use a filter made up of tiles of filters, each tile having a square sub-grid of 2 Green pixels, 1 Red pixel, and 1 Blue pixel. Soooooo - the color also comes at the expense of reducing image resolution by 4.
huh?
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