DgcityMost image systems move data through a chain: a sensor captures light, memory stores it, a processor interprets it. Each transfer costs time and energy. A new chip made in China collapses those steps into a single component.
Researchers from the Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences led the work with Peking University, East China Normal University and other partners. Their device is built from aluminium gallium nitride, a hard semiconductor already used in lighting and high-frequency electronics, arranged in alternating layers with different compositions.
Those layered interfaces carry opposite polarized charges and built-in electric fields. When light strikes the device and frees electrons and holes, the fields push the two apart toward different interfaces, reducing the chance they simply recombine. Asymmetric metal contacts then control where the separated charges go. Under one bias, holes are held at an interface while electrons produce a readable current, effectively storing the light. Under another bias, the stored charges are released and the same component switches into a fast detector mode, responding on the nanosecond scale.
The numbers are striking for a single device. It detected light at the nanowatt-per-square-centimetre level, operated stably at temperatures up to 300 degrees Celsius, and held a large contrast between states after long exposure to air. It can keep a persistent record of bright illumination, form several temporary states under weaker pulses, and be reset electrically.
To test whether those states are useful for computing, the team fed measured device behaviour into a neural network simulation for classifying clothing images. The model topped 90 percent accuracy, close to a full-precision software version, and a small fabricated array showed individual pixels capturing and holding light in parallel.
The authors are careful about limits: they demonstrated individual devices and a small array, not a full computing system, and energy and manufacturing yield at scale remain open questions. Even so, a chip that senses, remembers and preprocesses on the spot, built from one material system with standard fabrication steps, could find use in industrial monitoring, aerospace and other settings where heat and radiation make conventional electronics struggle.
