Adapted from this Berkeley Lab press release
Today’s optoelectronic devices, from smartphone cameras to scientific instruments that image the night sky or microscopic cells, are pushed to extract more and more information from photons – an energy-intensive process that limits device performance and some commercial and industrial applications.
To improve this process, a team of Foundry users, working with staff, is exploring a more efficient way to crunch photons into images that’s inspired by the human eye.
There’s significant room for improvement. Most optical sensors record data from light and then transmit all of the raw data to a computer for processing. This typically consumes much more energy than necessary, because in most applications, only a small amount of information relative to the raw data is needed to render the final output.
Instead, the team is developing a less power-hungry approach in which some data processing is conducted in the sensor itself, before the data is sent to a computer or processed by edge computing devices.
The Berkeley Lab-led project is part of the Microelectronics Energy Efficiency Research Center for Advanced Technologies (MEERCAT), which is one of three Microelectronics Science Research Centers recently announced by DOE. The centers, which bring together multi-institutional, multidisciplinary projects in partnership with industry, are organized around making microelectronics more energy efficient and able to operate better in extreme environments.
The researchers have previously investigated ways to create optical sensors by stitching together nanostructures such as nanotubes and nanowires. These “nanoscale hybrids” are highly sensitive in part because the sensor’s nanoscale components are smaller than the wavelength of light. The components of nanoscale hybrid sensors can also be tweaked in myriad ways, making them great platforms to explore how to best incorporate processing directly into a sensor.
Read more in the full press release.
