Artificial “Bionic” Eye Breakthrough

Champaign, IL—A new digital camera doesn’t just resemble a human eye, it works a lot like our eyes, too. Researchers at the University of Illinois copied the eye’s curvature to make light detectors with lots of advantages over traditional flat chips.

John Rogers, University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign: “This kind of technology that we’ve explored with the electronic eye very naturally integrates with different body parts and organs.“

Materials Eegineer John Rogers says the challenge was to make the silicon chips for capturing light flexible and stretchable.

Rogers: “Nobody was able to actually make it because all of the manufacturing technologies for detectors, photo-detector arrays, are only well-developed for flat planar surfaces, not hemispherical ones.“

As they wrote in the journal “Nature,“ his team created arrays of silicon light detectors, each just one pixel in size. They’re wired together with tiny flexible cables so they can be stretched into the shape of the eye’s retina.

Rogers: “That lets you go from the planar, or flat, configuration in which it’s initially fabricated, into this hemispherical shape that you were seeking to achieve for the artificial retina.“

Rogers says this flexible manufacturing method can work with any kind of sensor, not just light detectors. they’re now working on custom pacemakers that can wrap around the heart, meaning implants of the future will work more like mother nature.