Sensor breakthrough could beef up battery life

Touch-screen devices are all the rage these days. Their convenience and cachet have seduced digital device makers of every denomination, including bytecam houses like Sony and Panasonic. But a tech breakthrough by Capella Microsystems may give them something that will still be present after the lapdogs of fashion move on to the next trend. That something is longer battery life. The Santa Clara, Calif.based fabless semiconductor company announced yesterday that it has produced an industry first--a proximity and ambient-light sensor chip. The chip can be used for a number of applications like deactivating the display on a touch-screen phone when it's placed near an ear for talking. In the photographic world, it can be used to automatically turn a camera's LCD on or off depending on whether or not its operator is looking through the unit's viewfinder. By shaving the time that a display is active, the chip can extend the battery life of a device. “In the past, proximity and ambient light sensors had never been combined in a single chip because of the cost and space required for plastic filters," Capella President Cheng-chung Shih explained in a statement. "Our patent-pending Filtron technology allows us to overcome this obstacle by building the optical filters into the chip as part of the integrated circuit fabrication process.”