Towards a One Millimeter Thin Foil Camera

This paper summarizes our results and findings made throughout the past years on the way towards a one millimeter thin, flexible, and scalable foil camera. The sensor part of the camera consists of multiple thin-film luminescent concentrator (LC) layers, each of which is sensitive to a different band of the light spectrum. A special optical micro-structure cut into the edges of the LC layers multiplexes the transported light signal into a variant of the Radon transform of the image focused on the LC surface. For increasing the camera’s depth of field beyond the sensor surface, various thin-film imaging layers, such as optical Söller collimators realized by means of X-ray lithography on a PMMA wafer, have been investigated. The flexibility and scalability of our thin-film camera has the potential to lead to new human–computer interfaces that are unconstrained in shape and sensing-distance. Applications such as contact-less sensing, smart skin sensors for autonomous robots and industrial machines, and environment sensing for vehicles are imaginable.