Brief History of CCD cameras

The credit of designing and developing a CCD sensor goes to W.S Boyle and G.E Smith from Bell Telephone laboratories. The idea of developing an analogous device using a semiconductor struck Jack Morton, Vice president of Bell Laboratories, after the development of the magnetic bubble memory. During the same time picture phone, using diode array silicon, was also being developed. The amalgamation of these two technologies gave rise to the CCD sensor.

The first three phase device consisted of 100 micron metal plate separated by 3 micron spacing. The first gate electrode was used to inject charges into the second plate and the ninth plate was used to detect charge. Plates 2-8 were clocked to demonstrate the transfer process.

The Bucket Brigade Device (BBD) from Philips Research Laboratory was also being developed at the same time, but for various reasons BBD was never considered seriously as an imaging device.

In conclusion to this blog let's take a quick look at the data transfer rate for various interfaces (click to enlarge):

As always, please feel free to comment or contact me.

- Sudeep