Friday, April 20, 2012

GHz Imagers in Cellphones

As soon as ISSCC 2012 papers have been published on IEEE site, newspapers get excited about THz imagers presented there.

PopSci, Engadget and many others talk about work by Kenneth O, professor of EE at UT Dallas and director of the Texas Analog Center of Excellence(TxACE) at University of Texas at Dallas. "We’ve created approaches that open a previously untapped portion of the electromagnetic spectrum for consumer use and life-saving medical applications," said Dr. Kenneth O.

"CMOS is affordable and can be used to make lots of chips," Dr. O said. "The combination of CMOS and terahertz means you could put this chip and receiver on the back of a cellphone, turning it into a device carried in your pocket that can see through objects." Due to privacy concerns, Dr. O and his team are focused on uses in the distance range of less than four inches.

Meanwhile IEEE Spectrum talks about the THz camera designed by a team from IEMN and STMicroelectronics, in France, and the University of Wuppertal, in Germany.This camera has a resolution of 1024 pixels, frame rate 25fps and can operate out of USB power.

2 comments:

  1. Cool stuff! Curious to see how the applications will shake out!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Eric, your joke idea could be helpful for this application. The pixel is big and limited in number :)

    ReplyDelete

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