Scientists Create LED That Turns Phone Camera Into A Microscope

Researchers have created the world’s smallest silicon LED and holographic microscope that opens up a wide range of applications, including turning your smartphone camera into a portable, high-resolution microscope, Paul McClure reported for New Atlas.

Photo Insert: The researchers placed their tiny silicon LED in a 55 nm CMOS node alongside the other photonic and electronic components – all on one chip.

While photonic chips – microchips with two or more photonic components which form a functioning circuit – have come a long way in the field of lighting, integrating a small, bright on-chip light emitter has remained elusive.

Manufacturers resort to using an off-chip light source, which has low energy efficiency and limits the scalability of photonic chips.

But off-chip emitters may be a thing of the past as researchers from the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) who’ve developed the world’s smallest silicon light-emitting diode (LED) – at less than a micrometer wide – with an intensity comparable to much larger silicon LEDs.

Previous on-chip emitters were difficult to integrate into standard complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) platforms. CMOS is an integrated circuit built on a printed circuit board, the semiconductor technology used in most of today’s chips.

In mobile phones, CMOS is used as the ‘eye’ of the camera.

The researchers placed their tiny silicon LED in a 55 nm CMOS node alongside the other photonic and electronic components – all on one chip. The researchers found that their holographic lens provided more accurate high-resolution images than a regular optical microscope.

They calculated that its resolution was approximately 20 micrometers (microns). For context, a human skin cell is 20 to 40 microns across; a white blood cell is about 30 microns. The study was published in Nature Communications.

WEEKLY FEATURE : MVP Group Keeps Lights On During Pandemic