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  • Milestones
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Milestone 14

Digital photography is born

CCD cameras

Nature Materials volume 9, pages S14–S15 (2010)Cite this article

In the late summer of 1969, Boyle and Smith, who were working at Bell Laboratories, were told to come up with a semiconductor memory that could compete with the so-called 'magnetic bubble' memory that was being developed by a rival group of their division. Bubble memory worked by injecting magnetic domains into garnet patterned with an array of ferromagnetic bars. Applying an alternating magnetic field caused these domains, or bubbles, to hop within the garnet from underneath one bar to the next, like packages on a conveyor belt. By taking the presence or absence of a bubble to represent a 1 or a 0, respectively, such a device could be used to store a series of digital bits.

Boyle and Smith spent barely an hour at the blackboard devising an electronic alternative. Instead of magnetic bubbles, they proposed to use electronic charges injected into metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) capacitors grown on silicon. By placing two capacitors close to each other and applying electric voltages they could induce the charge to move from one to the next. In this way, packets of charge could be passed down a linear array of 'charge-coupled' MOS capacitors, mimicking the operation of a bubble array.

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References

ORIGINAL RESEARCH PAPERS

  1. Boyle W. S. & Smith, G. E. E. Charge coupled semiconductor devices. Bell Syst. Tech. J. 49, 587–592 (1970)

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  2. Amelio, G. F., Tompsett, M. F. & Smith, G. E. Experimental verification of the charge coupled device concept. Bell Syst. Tech. J. 49, 593–600 (1970)

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FURTHER READING

  1. Smith, G. E. The invention and early history of the CCD. Nucl. Instr. Meth. Phys. Res. A 607, 16 (2009)

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Senior Editor, Nature Physics,

    Ed Gerstner

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  1. Ed Gerstner
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Gerstner, E. Digital photography is born. Nature Mater 9 (Suppl 1), S14–S15 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat2651

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