Turns your smartphone into a projector

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The silicon chip acts as a lens-free projector and could one day end up on your smart phone
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Researchers at California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have developed a new 'light-bending silicon chip' which could help users give presentations that are projected on a conference room wall via your cell phone!

The new chip eliminates the need of expensive and bulky lens used in traditional projectors. Ali Hajimiri and his team were able to bypass traditional optics by manipulating the coherence of light - a property that allows the researchers to "bend" the light waves on the surface of the chip without lenses or the use of any mechanical movement.

“This chip uses a so-called integrated optical phased array (OPA) to project the image electronically with only a single laser diode as light source and no mechanically moving parts,” explained Ali Hajimiri, Thomas G. Myers professor of electrical engineering at Caltech. “By changing the relative timing of the waves, you can change the direction of the light beam,” Hajimiri added.

“The new thing about our work is really that we can do this on a tiny, one-millimeter-square silicon chip. We can do it very rapidly to form images since we phase-shift electronically in two dimensions,” said Behrooz Abiri, a graduate student in Hajimiri’s team.

“In the future, this can be incorporated into a cell phone. Since there is no need for a lens, you can have a phone that acts as a projector all by itself,” Hajimiri told the gathering at the Optical Fiber Communication (OFC) conference in San Francisco recently.

Researchers are developing new devices with smartphones to make our lives easier. Recently a team of researchers from University of Houston have developed a disease diagnostic system based on nanotechnology that will only require a smartphone and a Rs 1200 lens attachment to check for diseases. The tool will assist healthcare providers by giving them an affordable and easy to read method to diagnose diseases.