Researchers have created the world‘s smallest silicon LED and a holographic microscope, making smartphone applications even better, and cameras turning into portable, high-resolution microscopes.
Although photonic chips have made progress in the field of lighting, it is difficult to integrate a small, bright on-chip light emitter, so manufacturers generally use off-chip light sources, but this light source has low energy efficiency and limits the expansion of photonic chips sex.
Now researchers from the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) have developed the world‘s smallest silicon LED, less than 1 micron wide and comparable in intensity to larger silicon LEDs, making off-chip emitters possible A product of the past.
The researchers placed their mini-silicon LEDs in 55-nanometer CMOS on a wafer with other optoelectronic components.
To test how the LED could work in the real world, they placed it in a lensless holographic microscope, which is smaller and less expensive than a normal microscope. The researchers use a light source to illuminate the sample, and the light scatters onto a CMOS digital image sensor to form a digital hologram, which is then processed by a computer to generate the image.
However, reconstructing images with this type of microscope can be difficult because knowledge of the aperture of the light source, its wavelength, and the distance from the sample to the sensor is required. To do this, the researchers used a neural network algorithm to reconstruct objects viewed with a holographic microscope.
The researchers found that the holographic lens provided more accurate high-resolution images than ordinary optical microscopes, with a resolution of about 20 microns, smaller than human skin cells (20 to 40 microns in diameter) and white blood cells (30 microns).
The researchers believe the studies could help reconstruct microscopic objects, such as human tissue samples and plant seeds, and could also be used in existing smartphone lenses, simply by modifying the phone’s silicon chip and software to convert the phone to high-resolution microscope.
According to study author Rajeev Ram, the new LED is expected to be ideal for bioimaging and biosensing applications because of the wavelength relationship, coupled with high intensity and nanometer-scale emission area.
(Source of the first image: pixabay)
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