Black silicon promises 500x more sensitivity to light
SiOnyx executives holding the black silicon wafer. Picture credit: Rick Friedman for The New York Times
Eric Mazur and his graduate students were firing an intense laser light onto a silicon wafer and, by chance, added sulfur hexafluoride to it. This resulted in the creation of black silicon, whose surface is covered with microscopic spikes. We guess this increased the surface area of the chip and made it more sensitive to light. Also noteworthy is that the chip can detect infrared light, too.
New York Times reports that the production method will be compatible with what current silicon manufacturers employ, so its cost shouldn't be any higher than what is available on the market right now.
As Mazur's funding came from the university, Harvard has licensed patents to the black silicon, with its commercialization not far off the horizon. Currently, its most viable implementation would be in night-vision systems, but we think it could well make its way into digital cameras soon.
While it may be a novel idea to have a super-sensitive shooter, we can't help but wonder how the image quality will be like, and what kind of improvisations current image processors have to make in order to work seamlessly with black silicon.
Via New York Times
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