Have you ever wanted to show
images to your friends or watch movies or YouTube videos with them by projecting
them from your mobilephone on a wall? Or Give a presentation on with the help of your mobile
phone?? Or simply have a big screen
while you type in your messages??
Well these scenarios may soon
become reality thanks to the amazing new silicon chip that bends light within
itself developed by Ali Hajimiri, Professor of Electrical Engineering, along
with researchers in his lab.
Promising results were presented in San Francisco at the Optical Fiber Communication (OFC) conference on March 10 2014.
HOW IT WORKS:
First to understand how
this miniature wonder works we have to understand how a projector works.
Traditional projectors
which are generally used in classrooms, conference rooms and other places make
use of lens and bulbs to project images by passing a beam of light through a
tiny image. They Use lenses to map the points of the picture to an expanded
points on a large screen.
Now, The Hajimiri chip revolutionizes everything by eliminating the lenses and bulbs which also happens to be bulky
and expensive. Instead it uses an optical phased array (OPA).It projects the image
with a single laser diode as light source.
Let’s look at an example, assume 100 people kneeling in
line by a lake. If they slap the lake water at the same time, a big wave will
be created which will be travelling away from them. But if these 100 people are
told to slap the water a second after his neighbour has slapped the water, the wave
thus formed will be bend and travel at an angle.
This is exactly what the OPA phase shifter does…
This is exactly what the OPA phase shifter does…
Phase shifters in the OPA
chip alter the speed of the light waves and thereby the direction of the light
beam. The ‘data’ from a computer are converted into ‘multiple electrical
currents’ to form an image. The timed light beams are then delivered to tiny
array elements within a grid on the chip.
The light is then
projected from each array in the grid, these individual array beams combine
coherently in the air and form a single light beam and a spot on the screen.
The rapidly changing electronic signal and the light steers the beam right, left,
up, and down and acts as "a very fast brush" that draws an image made
of light on the projection surface.
Since it is created
electronically it can create a line very quickly and since this light is drawn
more than 24 times per second the human eye perceives the process as a single
image and not as a moving light beam.
Here is a video of how this chip operates:
Image projected using the
chip of letters C I and T using infrared rays
IMPACT:
So far, the images that
can be projected with the current version of the chip are somewhat simple like a
triangle, a smiley face, or single letters. However with larger chips that
include more light-delivering array elements (like using a larger lens on a
camera) can increase the complexity and improve the resolution of the projected
images.
As of now silicon chip are
used to project images in infrared light. However more work with different
types of semiconductors will enable us to expand this projector's capabilities
into the different spectrum. For instance with the exact same architecture and semiconductor
III-V technology images can be obtained in visible spectrum.
In the near future, this chip
can be incorporated into a mobile phone, and as there is no need for a lens, one
can have a mobile phone that can act as a projector by itself. The beauty of
this chip is that they are small and have a very low cost of production.
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VERDICT:
This amazing new technology is
all set to revolutionize the mobile phone industry. A phone with projector is
sure to become a fad. This technology does open a world of possibilities…
So what is your take on
this chip? Let us know by commenting and giving us your feedback.