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Ultra-slim camera without optical lenses

12.07.2017

Traditional cameras, even the smallest ones that are installed in mobile phones, cannot be very thin due to the presence of an optical system in them, lenses that must have a strictly defined shape and size. But researchers at the California Institute of Technology have developed a fundamentally new type of camera that replaces the lenses with an optical phased array (OPA). And this grating performs the same role as the large optical components, it allows you to control the light that hits the sensor so that the sensors can form a complete image.

Lenses with a certain radius of curvature refract the light entering them and allow it to be focused on the surface of the sensor. An optical phase grating consists of a set of photodetectors, each of which operates with a strictly defined delay, which makes it possible to detect light with a given phase value. This, in turn, allows the flat camera to "look" in different directions and focus on different objects.

The high speed of the phase grating allows the camera to consistently focus on small parts of the future image. At the same time, the change in the direction of the "look" of the camera is carried out very quickly, for periods of time calculated in femtoseconds.

Phase gratings have been used for a long time in radio communications and radar technologies. These arrays consist of many transmitter elements emitting the same signal with a slightly different phase. The electromagnetic waves of these signals interact with each other, which leads to the fact that only a signal that propagates only in a certain direction is amplified. And such a grating is capable of emitting a focused beam of electromagnetic waves, the direction of which can be controlled with sufficiently high accuracy without the need for moving mechanical components.

The optical phase grating consists of 64 photosensitive elements and is a thin layer of silicon on which all the necessary photonic elements are created. This component performs two functions at once, the function of a lens and the function of a light sensor, which, in theory, should significantly reduce the cost of future digital cameras. In addition, the digital control of the optical grille allows you to switch it to several modes, in the mode of a conventional lens, in a wide-angle lens, the so-called "fisheye", and in a telephoto lens mode.

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