Cornell University Develops Lens-Free, Pinhead-Sized Camera With 20px Resolution

Cornell University engineers have developed a camera that does not require lenses, is pinhead sized and takes few pennies to make. Oh well, it's not going to replace your regular digital camera. The new camera is intended for research use and expected to revolutionize everything from surgery to micro-robotics. The tiny camera has been developed in the lab of Alyosha Molnar, Cornell assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering. Team led by Patrick Gill, a postdoctoral associate developed the camera.

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Lens Free Digital Camera | Image Via: Gizmag

The camera is 100th of a millimeter thick, and one-half millimeter on each side and captures images at 20x20px resolution. Now, at this resolution, this camera isn't suitable to capture your child's birthday party photos, but it surely can capture the stuff which was harder to see with naked eyes; typically useful in medical surgery and micro-electronics. The project initially started as a side-project while the researchers were working on imaging brain activity. The researchers wanted to develop an implementable lens-less camera which can capture neurons in action.

The camera is a flat piece of doped silicon and resembles a compact disk in appearance. None of the parts require off-chip manufacturing. This keeps the cost of developing the camera down to just few cents. The researchers like to call their camera "Planar Fourier Capture Array (PFCA)" because it uses Fourier Transforms. Each pixel in the PFCA corresponds to one component of the Fourier Transform of the image being captured. The researchers promised that they'll keep evolving their device. The funds for the project have been raised from Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Institutes of Health.

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