Every time you snap a photo with your smartphone, you’re using technology that almost didn’t make it out of the laboratory.
While working at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in the 1990s, I led the development of the “camera-on-a-chip” — a breakthrough that replaced bulky camera components with a tiny semiconductor image sensor. Today, the technology my team and I pioneered — known as the complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) image sensor — powers the cameras in smartphones, laptops, autonomous vehicles, and countless other products. Roughly seven billion CMOS image sensors are now produced each year.
