The man's side of it!

I found this cool article about the invention of the CCD (Charge coupled Device) that makes possible the "magic" of the digital camera.

1-Hour Brainstorm Gave Birth to Digital Imaging

(Newsbytes Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)Even today, Willard S. Boyle can remember the noise the boss's phone made when it rang on his desk about 8:30 a.m. back in the late '60s. It was the legendary Jack Morton, vice president of electronic technology at Bell Laboratories, and he wasn't calling to say good morning.

"It was not a welcome sound," Boyle recalled. Bell was investigating new ways of storing data, and the hot technology at the time was something called "magnetic bubbles." Morton, who died in 1971, "was enthralled with magnetic bubbles," Boyle said.

Unfortunately for Boyle, he was a semiconductor guy. "So what are working on?" Morton would ask. He called every two or three days, and Boyle and collaborator George E. Smith soon got the idea that their funding might disappear unless they invented something in a hurry. So they did.

In a one-hour brainstorming session in late 1969, Boyle and Smith drew up the basic design for a memory chip they called a "charge-coupled device," more familiarly known as a "CCD." It worked fine for data storage -- but anybody could see that its future lay in its breathtaking potential for capturing and storing images.

CCDs are what made digital still and video cameras possible. CCDs can X-ray a child's teeth, see a person's insides during laparoscopy, and produce stunning images of the Martian desert from the "eyes" of NASA's traveling rovers.

Although less familiar to the public, Boyle and Smith's device has become as ubiquitous as the laptop computer or the laser. These integrated circuits capture and store light in devices as mundane as supermarket bar-code readers and as spectacular as the Hubble Space Telescope.

Tomorrow, the National Academy of Engineering will recognize their breakthrough, awarding them the $500,000 Charles Stark Draper Prize, one of engineering's most prestigious honors.

"It is a great innovation," said Ruzena Bajcsy, the University of California at Berkeley computer scientist and robotics specialist who nominated the two researchers for the prize. "It enables you to have miniaturized cameras, to look inside the human body, to do all kinds of surveillance. There's nothing like it."

Boyle, now 82 and living in Halifax, Nova Scotia, was executive director of Bell Labs' semiconductor division in 1969. Smith, 75, and now living in Barnegat, N.J., worked for him. And both worked for Morton, a legendary figure in the development of transistors in the late 1940s at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, N.J.

Impelled by the need to invent a data storage device and protect their budget from being swallowed by the department of magnetic bubbles, Boyle summoned Smith one afternoon, and together, on a blackboard, they sketched out a new device.

A CCD consists of a silicon chip sensitive to light and able to store packets of charges in tiny wells, or capacitors, inside it. When photons hit the silicon in the CCD, they dislodge electrons, creating a charge proportional to the light's intensity. The capacitors collect and store the charge. Each CCD is an array of these capacitors, forming pixels.

Once the charges are stored, voltage is cycled through the device, deforming the wells and causing the charges to travel from pixel to pixel in an orderly fashion until the entire "charge packet" is dumped into a signal processor that digitizes the collected charge to reproduce the original image.

"We could see it was going to be a strong competitor with magnetic bubbles," Smith recalled. "But we could also see the imaging potential immediately."

The two researchers kept their discovery relatively quiet for a few weeks. "We had confidence that our idea was sound and important," the pair wrote in a 1976 journal article, despite the sniping they endured from skeptics.

And then they made the first CCD on a simple metal oxide array. It worked, and the whole lab rallied to help develop the concept.

"After making the first couple of imaging devices," Smith said, "we knew for certain that chemistry photography was dead."

And so it has proved. The first CCD had six pixels. Today the average digital camera has 4 million to 6 million pixels. A news photographer uses a camera with 8 million pixels or more, and Eastman Kodak Co. now makes a 39 million-pixel image sensor for professional studio cameras.

"The CCD enabled us to capture an image electronically," said products marketing manager Michael DeLuca of Kodak. "That was the linchpin." Even the competing technology known as CMOS derives from the CCD, he said.

Kodak made its first CCD digital camera as a "proof of concept" 30 years ago, DeLuca said. It had a 10,000-pixel sensor, 16 AA batteries and a cassette tape to store the data.

In the late 1980s, Kodak developed the professional "Kodak Digital Camera System," which debuted -- with a 20-megabyte hard disk and a backpack to run the electronics -- at the 1991 Super Bowl.

The New York Giants' 20-19 victory over the Buffalo Bills that day was a benchmark in the CCD's march to dominance in photography, but in many ways commercial cameras were Johnny-come-latelies. Astronomy was way ahead.

"Back at the beginning, cameras would take film pictures from military satellites, then drop the rolls so they would fall back to Earth, where airplanes would pluck them out of the air," said astrophysicist Keith C. Gendreau of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "That didn't get you very far."

Around 1980, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology built CCD arrays and trucked them around to different observatories, showing scientists how they worked, Gendreau said. "Gradually, they began to replace film cameras in telescopes."

All this on-ground experience helped mature the technology and led to the "wide field and planetary camera" that flew into space in 1990 with the Hubble telescope to inaugurate space-based optical astronomy. Being far more sensitive than film, CCDs can more easily peer into the far reaches of space.

"There wouldn't be any space-based astronomy without them," Gendreau said.

Fame and fortune came slowly for Boyle and Smith. Bell Labs owned the patents on the CCD, and "we didn't get a penny," Smith said, but he noted that the Draper Prize will help fix that.

Boyle said he spent most of his retirement -- beginning in 1979 -- quietly, "until about seven years ago." That was when 15 observatories sent Boyle and Smith messages of congratulations on the 30th anniversary of their invention.

"We sort of revolutionized the business," Boyle said. "The other thing was looking at the Mars rovers. My God, that was a thrill."

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