Engineers are building a single camera chip that sees visible light, mid-infrared heat, and far-infrared terahertz radiation all at once. Today’s cameras typically capture only one wavelength band—visible, thermal, or terahertz—and combining images from separate sensors requires complex post-processing. No one has yet integrated all three coaxially on the same chip. This project aims to close that gap by stacking physically large far-infrared sensors vertically with visible and mid-infrared detectors, using hybridised semiconductor materials and metamaterial filters to separate the wavelengths. If successful, the chip could transform medical diagnostics—for example, letting a surgeon see surface tissue, deeper inflammation, and chemical composition in a single live view. In security, it could detect concealed objects and identify materials simultaneously. The approach exploits cheap, scalable CMOS manufacturing, so the resulting cameras could become affordable enough for widespread use in clinics, factories, and airports. The work is applied engineering rather than fundamental science: the team intends to demonstrate the world’s first superspectral camera, not to explore a new physical principle.
View original technical description
Optical imaging is perhaps the single most important sensor modality in use today. Its use is widespread in consumer, medical, commercial and defence technologies. The most striking development of the last 20 years has been the emergence of digital imaging using complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology. Because CMOS is scalable, camera technology has benefited from Moore's law reduction in transistor size so that it is now possible to buy cameras with more than 10 MegaPixels for £50. The same benefits are beginning to emerge in other imaging markets - most notably in infrared imaging where 64x64 pixel thermal cameras can be bought for under £1000. Far infrared (FIR), or terahertz, imaging is now emerging as a vital modality with application to biomedical and security imaging, but early imaging arrays are still only few pixel research ideas and prototypes that we are currently investigating. There has been no attempt to integrate the three different wavelength sensors coaxially on to the same chip. Sensor fusion is already widespread whereby image data from traditional visible and mid infrared (MIR) sensors is overlaid to provide a more revealing and data rich visualisation. Image fusion permits discrepancies to be identified and comparative processing to be performed. Our aim is to create a "superspectral" imaging chip. By superspectral we mean detection in widely different bands, as opposed to the discrimination of many wavelengths inside a band - e.g. red, green and blue in the visible band. We will use "More than Moore" microelectronic technology as a platform. By doing so, we will leverage widely available low-cost CMOS to build new and economically significant technologies that can be developed and exploited in the UK. There are considerable challenges to be overcome to make such technology possible. We will hybridise two semiconductor systems to integrate efficient photodiode sensors for visible and MIR detection. We will integrate bolometric sensing for FIR imaging. We will use design and packaging technologies for thermal isolation and to optimise the performance of each sensor type. We will use hybridised metamaterial and surface plasmon resonance technologies to optimise wavelength discrimination allowing vertical stacking of physically large (i.e. FIR) sensors with visible and MIR sensors. We ultimate want to demonstrate the world's first ever super-spectral camera.
Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.
Is something wrong? Let us know