(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- A camera so small you could stick it on a wall, on your clothes, or even on your skin without anyone noticing? Sounds like the stuff of spy novels. But not for long. Ali Hajimiri, a professor of electrical engineering at the California Institute of Technology, estimates his lozenge-shaped camera, thinner than a human hair, could come to market in as few as three years.
Hajimiri needs tweezers to pick up the prototype, which looks a bit like a computer chip but is a nanoscale maze of silicon, silicon dioxide, and germanium strands called an optical phased array. The arrangement detects and captures light without lenses or mechanical parts, enabling it to produce images at many different focal depths simultaneously. The potential applications for the camera are vast, particularly when it comes to medicine. “Endoscopy devices that take images inside [the digestive system] are limited by the camera,” he says. “Imagine you can have something so thin that it doesn’t impact anything.”
Growing up in Iran, Hajimiri taught himself to program in Basic by translating the user manual of the ZX Spectrum, an early personal computer made by Britain’sSinclair Research, using an English-Farsi dictionary. He defected to the U.S. in 1994 after college and worked for Philips Semiconductor, where he crafted chips for cellular phones. He went on to jobs at Sun Microsystems Inc. and Lucent Technologies Inc., then received a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford in 1998. He joined the faculty of Caltech soon after.
Today, Hajimiri has more than 90 U.S. patents to his name, including one for the first radar to fit on a microchip, which is used in self-driving Teslas. While there are significant kinks to work out with the camera—including image resolution, connectivity, and battery life—the tech world is excited. “We’ve seen the trend in recent years shift toward computational photography, and I think we’re just beginning to see what’s possible there,” says Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger. “Miniaturizing the technology and removing moving parts could mean a camera available and ready at all times.”
By taking the technology public in June, Hajimiri made it all but obsolete to the intelligence community, which he doesn’t mind. Big-name camera companies have expressed interest, as have cellphone makers. “The thickness of your cellphone is determined by your camera,” he says. “We’re trying to eliminate that.”
To contact the author of this story: Adam Popescu in Washington at adampopescu@gmail.com.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jillian Goodman at jgoodman74@bloomberg.net.
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