Researched
CCD image sensor
Boyle and Smith's charge-coupled device (1969) turned light into digital images and became the eye of telescopes and cameras.
Open in the interactive tree →Willard Boyle and George Smith sketched the charge-coupled device at Bell Labs in 1969: a chip that shifts packets of charge along a row of tiny MOS capacitors and so reads out an image. CCDs replaced photographic plates in astronomy, flew on the Hubble Space Telescope and Gaia, and powered the first digital cameras. Boyle and Smith received the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics; cheaper CMOS sensors have since taken over phones.
Prerequisites
- Integrated Circuit1958-1959
- MOSFET and CMOS chips1959
Unlocks
- Hubble Space Telescope1990Hubble's cameras use CCD detectors
- ImageNet dataset2009
- Kepler Planet Census2009
- Gaia: 3D Map of the Milky Way2018–2022Gaia's focal plane is a mosaic of CCDs
- Rubin and Roman sky surveys2026Rubin's 3.2-gigapixel camera is a mosaic of CCDs