New camera design to make smartphones slimmer

To make smartphones more slimmer, a group of engineers has developed a new camera design that replaces the lenses with an ultra-thin optical phased array (OPA).
According to a paper presented at the Optical Society of America's (OSA) Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO) and published online in the OSA Technical Digest, the OPA computationally manipulates incoming light to capture an image -- exactly what lenses do using large pieces of glass.
"We have created a single thin layer of integrated silicon photonics that emulates the lens and sensor of a digital camera, reducing the thickness and cost of digital cameras," said Ali Hajimiri from the California Institute of Technology.
"With our new system, you can selectively look in a desired direction and at a very small part of the picture in front of you at any given time, by controlling the timing with femto-second -- quadrillionth of a second -- precision," Hajimiri mentioned.
These waves interfere with each other constructively and destructively, amplifying the signal in one direction while cancelling it out elsewhere.
Thus, an array can create a tightly focused beam of signal, which can be steered in different directions by staggering the timing of transmissions made at various points across the array.
A similar principle is used in reverse in an optical phased array receiver, which is the basis for the new camera.