Queen Elizabeth Prize winners Michael Tompsett, Nobukazu Teranishi and Eric Fossum qeprize.org
A 拢1 million engineering prize has been awarded to the creators of digital imaging technology聽now used in everything from medical sensors to smartphone cameras.
The winners of the 2017 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering were announced at a ceremony at the Royal Academy of Engineering in London on Wednesday, and are , , Nobukazu Teranishi, and . They worked on three technologies that made the cameras we use today possible.
Smith worked with Willard Boyle, now deceased, to develop the charged couple device (CCD) at Bell Labs in the US in the 1970s. Tompsett then realised this could have applications as an image sensor. CCD sensors were used in early digital cameras, and work by producing electrical signals when they detect light.
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Teranishi invented the pinned photodiode (PPD) in 1980, while at the NEC Corporation in Japan. The PPD is a type of semiconductor that聽made it possible to capture images of higher quality.
The following decade, Fossum and his team at NASA鈥檚 Jet Propulsion Laboratory worked on聽聽complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) sensor聽technology. Originally developed to make cameras used on spacecraft smaller and lighter, CMOS sensors require much less power than CCD sensors. This has led to the development of small cameras in smartphones and even 鈥減ill cameras鈥 that can image the inside of the body when swallowed.
Trillions of devices
Speaking at a press conference before the award ceremony, Tompsett said that the strangest application he had heard of for the image sensing technology came from a group who wanted to insert a camera into the uterus of a sheep, 鈥渢o observe ovulation or something鈥. Fossum said he had never imagined the technology becoming popular for taking selfies or 鈥渟illy cat videos鈥.
Together, the winners’ contributions to聽image sensors have 鈥渢ruly transformed the way we look at the world,鈥 said Christopher Snowden, chairman of the award鈥檚 judging panel, noting that 鈥渢here are 鈥渓iterally trillions of these devices in the world today.鈥
Fossum, who is currently working on image sensors that count individual photons, says the technology will continue to develop to capture images of even higher quality and make more and more applications possible.
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