In the early 1990′s, while you were busy watching a new show called Seinfeld, Eric Fossum was busy inventing something revolutionary. Fossum had recently joined the NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and was asked to come up with a new type of image sensor. Solid-state sensors up to that point had been CCD sensors which suffered from three major problems – cost, power consumption, and reliability. It was at this time that Fossum and team came up with the CMOS active pixel sensor – a new technology which could be fabricated with off the shelf integrated circuit manufacturing techniques.
Fast forward twenty years and the CMOS active pixel sensor has become the mainstay of the camera industry. Virtually every DSLR and cell phone camera now relies on Fossum’s technology.
Rccently, Fossum was invited back to his alma mater (Yale) to speak at the Victor M. Tyler Distinguished Lectureship in Engineering. Yale has done us the favor of publishing Fossum’s talk on YouTube. This lecture covers everything from next generation image sensor technology to the societal impacts of ubiquitous cameras. So get out your notebook and pretend you are back in college. Don’t’ worry though – this information won’t be on the final.
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