NAE Honors CCD Inventors with Prestigious Prize

On February 21, the National Academy of Engineering presented the coveted 2006 Charles Stark Draper Prize to Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith, inventors of charge-coupled devices (CCDs), during a ceremony in Washington, DC. Boyle and Smith invented CCDs, the first practical solid-state imaging devices, in 1969. These imaging sensors convert light to digital data, and are essential to the workings of the Mars rovers, the Hubble Space Telescope, and various medical imaging devices. CCD technology launched the field of machine vision. (www.nae.edu/NAE/awardscom.nsf