In a digital device, these voltages are then sampled, digitized, and usually stored in memory in an analog device (such as an analog video camera), they are processed into a continuous analog signal (e.g. By repeating this process, the controlling circuit converts the entire contents of the array in the semiconductor to a sequence of voltages.
The last capacitor in the array dumps its charge into a charge amplifier, which converts the charge into a voltage. Once the array has been exposed to the image, a control circuit causes each capacitor to transfer its contents to its neighbor (operating as a shift register). A one-dimensional array, used in line-scan cameras, captures a single slice of the image, whereas a two-dimensional array, used in video and still cameras, captures a two-dimensional picture corresponding to the scene projected onto the focal plane of the sensor. Īn image is projected through a lens onto the capacitor array (the photoactive region), causing each capacitor to accumulate an electric charge proportional to the light intensity at that location. Before this happened, Iwama died in August 1982 subsequently, a CCD chip was placed on his tombstone to acknowledge his contribution. Eventually, Sony managed to mass-produce CCDs for their camcorders. Under the leadership of Kazuo Iwama, Sony also started a large development effort on CCDs involving a significant investment. The first KH-11 KENNEN reconnaissance satellite equipped with charge-coupled device array ( 800 x 800 pixels) technology for imaging was launched in December 1976. Steven Sasson, an electrical engineer working for Kodak, invented the first digital still camera using a Fairchild 100 x 100 CCD in 1975. Fairchild's effort, led by ex-Bell researcher Gil Amelio, was the first with commercial devices, and by 1974 had a linear 500-element device and a 2-D 100 x 100 pixel device. Several companies, including Fairchild Semiconductor, RCA and Texas Instruments, picked up on the invention and began development programs. By 1971, Bell researchers led by Michael Tompsett were able to capture images with simple linear devices. This device had input and output circuits and was used to demonstrate its use as a shift register and as a crude eight pixel linear imaging device.Development of the device progressed at a rapid rate. The first working CCD made with integrated circuit technology was a simple 8-bit shift register.