None of that will happen, however, without the emergence of some powerful new enabling technologies. For high-resolution cameras to reach the cell phone market, for example, pixels must get smarter, not just greater in number.

And for large-area displays to break into new applications, processors will need to deal with greater signal complexity at each pixel.

If engineers are successful in implementing such technologies, the resulting product changes could be dramatic. "Pretty soon, everybody in the world will have a high-quality camera with them at all times," said Bill Bucklen, product line director for Analog Devices' Visual Signal Processing Group (Wilmington, Mass.).

At the same time, the emphasis on the smart pixel will spread into the large-area display market, yielding a new crop of bigger, better screens for televisions, medical systems, military and marine devices.

"The venerable CRT will be slowly replaced by a plethora of display technologies that have been under development for some time," said Ed Spence, product marketing manager for display driver products at Analog Devices Inc.

Experts say that the key to unlocking the next generation of image quality, whether in cell phone-cameras or large-area displays, lies in the new view of the lowly pixel. To date, the way to create greater image quality was to simply add pixels. Not anymore, though.

"The megapixel wars are over," noted Chuck Goehringer, director of digital imaging products at Analog Devices. "It's universally believed that as we move to 3-, 4- and 5-megapixels, we're adding cost and getting limited picture-quality improvements in return."

Moreover, engineers say that they're bumping up against the limitations of nature as they try to squeeze in more pixels.

"We can't keep shrinking pixel size forever," added Neil McCaffrey, engineering manager for imagers and cameras at Dialogue Semiconductor PLC (Clinton, N.J.). "Our area is being limited by the laws of physics right now."

Many engineers believe that the key to greater image quality lies in CMOS technologies, which enable them to more easily create "smart pixels." In contrast to conventional charge-coupled devices, which collect light in pixels and process them in serial fashion, CMOS devices are addressable. As a result, they can be programmed to do more sophisticated filtering, shaping and controlling of light in the camera.

To aid in the creation of smarter imagers, several companies are working on new sensor technologies. Foveon Inc., for example, has departed from the one-color-per-pixel convention to create image sensors that capture red, green and blue light at every pixel. By developing a three-color pixel technique, Foveon engineers say they've learned that there's no need to rely on software interpolation to reconstruct missing information, because all of the necessary information is captured by the company's three-color design.

Similarly, Sony Corp. is working on a four-color filter array pattern for a consumer CCD that will compete with the conventional three-color patterns. The company claims that it will yield results that are closer to the "natural sight perception" of the human eye.

Such advances in sensors and software algorithms, however, can only work if electronics manufacturers can create systems that are fast enough and small enough to process the information.

"If you give me 1,000 Mips per pixel, I'm going to create a much better image than I am with 10 Mips," Goehringer said. "The idea is not to add more pixels, but to do more processing on every pixel."

Similarly, engineers at Analog Devices are trying to solve the problem by building stacked-die multichip modules (MCMs) that can cut board space to a half, or even a quarter, of the space needed for today's camera modules.

"If you're a camera designer, it means that you're going to be able to put an entire camera in a package about the size of your little fingernail," said Bucklen of Analog Devices.

The upshot of the smaller cameras is that they are likely to open up applications that didn't previously exist. Automakers, for example, are now said to be considering the use of as many as four cameras per car by 2008, for such applications as collision avoidance and driver-drowsiness detection.

"The general consensus is that the best way to protect people in autos is with vision systems," said McCaffrey of Dialogue Semiconductor. "We're working closely with tier-one suppliers to come up with custom CMOS solutions for those applications."

Many of the same principles apply to the large-area-display market, engineers say. As the demand for resolution in such displays climbs, the need for greater processing power in the "signal chain" rises, too. By developing faster digital signal processors (DSPs), engineers can enable high-resolution displays to convert data and more quickly deliver that data to drive the high volume of pixels used in such systems.

At Analog Devices, engineers are developing processing blocks that enable the displays to handle the 10-bit and even 12-bit inputs employed in the next generation of such displays.

Similarly, engineers at NEC Electronics America are developing devices to eliminate the problems caused by changes in ambient lighting, particularly those related to movement between indoor and outdoor lighting. The company is now working on a "transflective technology," which combines the characteristics of transmissive displays (typically used indoors) and reflective displays (typically employed outdoors). Transflective technology, incorporated on a thin-film-transistor (TFT) device, includes transmissive and reflective areas in a single chip.

"With this technology, you don't have to worry about the surrounding light," said Omid Milani, director of displays for NEC Electronics America. "A sensor 'looks' at the light in the environment, and the display adjusts itself to transmissive, reflective, or some combination thereof."

Engineers expect the move to higher-resolution displays to reap benefits in previously untapped markets, such as in medical, military-aerospace and desktop publishing.

Ultimately, however, the television market may be the biggest beneficiary of all, as new and faster processors enable manufacturers to go to sleek, LCD-type displays approaching 50 inches, while still achieving high resolution.

"As the resolution and size goes up, we'll deliver the (processing) performance," said Spence of Analog Devices. "Eventually, we'll be seeing televisions in places that we never dreamed of before."

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