Microcamera for Disposable Endoscopes

The Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Microintegration (IZM) in Berlin, Germany has developed an inexpensive microcamera, the size of a large grain of salt, to be used in disposable endoscopes. They were able to minimize the image sensor’s size by reworking the electrical wiring to the individual parts of the sensor to go through the back of the wafer rather than the side. This allowed for such a reduction in size that the sensor can now be mounted right on the endoscope’s tip, rather than the usual location at the base of the endoscope connected by glass fiber to the lens at the tip. The camera still has a limited resolution of 62,500 pixels and measures 1.0 × 1.0 × 1.2 millimeter. The researchers have a prototype disposable endoscopes ready and expect, optimistically, to be able to manufacture them for only a few euros by 2012.
Press release: Cameras out of the salt shaker…