ISO 25,000,000 anyone? Black Silicon
October 12th, 2008 Posted in Other News
Black Silicon
Any interesting new technology for low light applications.
“IT started with a Harvard physicist acting on a hunch. It ended up producing a new material, called black silicon, that could have a broad impact on technologies ranging from ultrasensitive sensors to photovoltaic cells.”
Read more at the NY Times
cr
October 12th, 2008 at 2:33 pm
Interesting. Thx for the link to the article. New site looks great btw.
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October 12th, 2008 at 3:33 pm
No dought that it would be a military purpose technology at first (if it will exist at all). It could be too expensive, too complicate, probably it has go the quantum computer way.
So lets say CR2 :)))
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October 12th, 2008 at 4:23 pm
Its been around for quite a while, but no one has actually been able to put it to use. you can bet that researchers for camera sensors have been looking at it. I hope they figure out how to make a high resolution sensor.
Its cheap to make, but from the description, it apparently requires a larger area to be efficient, so I doubt if it works in a 10MP camera, but low resolution sensord may work fine.
From 2001:
http://www.hno.harvard.edu/gazette/2001/10.11/01-silicon.html
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October 13th, 2008 at 6:56 am
“…which absorbs about twice as much visible light as normal silicon and has the ability to detect infrared light that is invisible to the current generation of silicon detectors.”
I’m guessing the 100-500x figure is somewhere in the infrared, as visible seems to be 2x. So no crazy high ISO camera, though it would be nice :)
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October 13th, 2008 at 3:05 pm
1.4 billion-pixel digital camera!!! wow!!
It is part of a telescope used to detect asteroids!
Here’s the link…
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/north_east/6445463.stm
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October 14th, 2008 at 11:16 am
the first commercial application of that silicon would be optical communication – right now the receivers are quite poor so the signal has to be amplified, and noise is introduced as a result etc. etc. but with this, the potential would be to have much longer lines without any amplification noise – so expect your internet speeds to go up, not camera ISO =]
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