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Marc Loinaz
Inventor of one-chip video camera
The one-chip video camera was first made by Marc Loinaz, a Filipino inventor from New Jersey.
Using the same ho-hum materials found in a personal computer, Marc Loinaz and his colleagues at Lucent Technologies have created every secret agent's dream contraption: a video camera the size of a cigarette lighter. Lucent's impetus was a little more practical, however. It was looking to create imaging devices "so cheap and low power they can be integrated into everything from wristwatches to kitchen appliances," Loinaz says.
Today's video cameras generate pictures from charge-coupled devices (CCDs), which provide a great picture but require a pile of support circuitry that cannot sit on the same chip as the image sensors. "This makes CCD cameras relatively large, power hungry, and complicated to design and manufacture," says Loinaz. The one-chip camera, on the other hand, is based on the same ubiquitous silicon chip found in microprocessors and memory devices.
A big challenge for Loinaz's team was "getting the sensitive analog circuits to live happily with the digital signal processing circuits on the same piece of silicon." Ultimately they taught the two circuits simply to ignore each other. "We scheduled operations on the chip so that during all the sensitive analog operations, we shut down the digital circuits."
Lucent recently licensed its video on a chip to Vanguard International Semiconductor, which plans to market products based on the technology sometime this year. Mini-video imagers might be mounted on car bumpers to eliminate blind spots and reduce collisions. The one-chip camera could also be used in home security. And then, of course, there's the potential for things like portable video wristwatch phones.
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