Photo Opportunities
An engineer wins an Emmy Award, and his invention travels to Mars.
By Rina Diane Caballar
Eric Fossum is best known for inventing the “camera on a chip” used in most of today’s smartphones, webcams, and medical imaging devices. He has garnered numerous accolades for his image sensor, but this year’s Technology & Engineering Emmy Award is the most renowned.
“I have received other prizes, but the Emmy Award is something everybody knows and gets excited about,” Fossum says. “It feels good.”
The Technology & Engineering awards are given to individuals or organizations for developments in engineering technologies that “either represent so extensive an improvement on existing methods or are so innovative in nature that they materially have affected television.” A committee of engineers working in the industry deliberates on its technical developments and which merit an award.
The award’s name comes from “Immy,” a nickname for the image orthicon tube used in early television cameras. The moniker was eventually feminized and paired with a statuette of a winged woman holding an atom. “It’s supposed to represent the marriage of the arts with science,” says Fossum, “which makes the award even more significant to me.”
While the CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) image sensor is now ubiquitous, it was originally designed for NASA’s spacecraft. Between 1990 and 1996, Fossum managed the image sensor and focal-plane technology division of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). His team was asked to shrink cameras for the spacecraft in line with its reduction in size and cost.
“That was the mother of my invention—to make the cameras smaller,” Fossum says. “We had to think about how to build a good image sensor using microelectronics.”
The Emmy winner dual-majored in physics and engineering at Connecticut’s Trinity College, and then earned master’s and doctorate degrees in engineering and applied science at Yale University. After leaving NASA, Fossum embarked on an entrepreneurial path. He founded Photobit Corporation, a supplier of CMOS image sensors, in 1996. After he sold the company in 2001, he became CEO of Siimpel Corporation, a company launched to develop microelectromechanical systems for smaller digital cameras.
Engineering is in Fossum’s genes, with family members such as his father and brother in the field. And inventing was intuitive to him. “When I started working on real problems, that’s when I realized I was an inventor,” he explains. “It’s natural when you’re an engineer, because you’re working at the forefront of technology.”
Now at Dartmouth College, Fossum serves as senior professor for emerging technologies and director of the PhD Innovation Program in the Thayer School of Engineering. He’s also Dartmouth’s vice provost for entrepreneurship and technology transfer. “I’m able to combine my interest in research and advanced technology,” he notes, “but all the experience I had in business and entrepreneurship was also something Dartmouth valued.”
Staying true to his inventive and entrepreneurial nature, Fossum cofounded Gigajot Technology in 2017 with two of his former PhD students. The start-up is commercializing quanta image sensors, which Fossum describes as “sensors sensitive to a single photon of light.”
“We’re pushing the limits of what you can do with image sensors, and if you can detect single photons, then you can create a camera that works in the dimmest conceivable light,” he explains.
Fossum never envisioned the widespread impact of the CMOS image sensor across society. “The fact that it creates so much connectivity is a good thing,” he says. “I did expect there would be this tension between privacy and security, but I didn’t expect the visual information overload we would get from cameras, or even AI surveillance. It’s hard to anticipate how your inventions will be used.”
One use he did hope for occurred recently: NASA’s Perseverance rover, sent to Mars in 2020, incorporated CMOS image sensors in its cameras. “I was born at the start of the space age in October 1957, when Sputnik launched into space,” Fossum says. “The space program has always been an important part of my life and having a chance to work for NASA JPL was a dream come true.” To be able to see the technology used in the way he invented it and had once dreamed of, he continues, was very satisfying. “My ‘eyes’ went to Mars.”
Rina Diane Caballar is a freelance writer covering technology and its intersections with science, society, and the environment.
© ATAS/NATAS/Alexander Da Silva