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Rambus kicked off Mobile World Congress 2015 by announcing its newly minted lensless smart sensor (LSS) POD (Partners in Open Development) program. “Individuals and companies designing sensors for the rapidly evolving Internet of Things (IoT) are often forced to code complex algorithms from the ground up,” Kendra De Berti, a director at Rambus, told us on the sidelines of MWC 2015 in Barcelona.
Collaboration with inaugural partners — frog and IXDS — enables development across critical IoT application areas
SUNNYVALE, Calif., and BARCELONA, Spain — March 2, 2015 — Rambus Inc. (NASDAQ:RMBS) today announced its Partners-in-Open-Development (POD) program in collaboration with design firms frog and IXDS to promote the adoption of its lensless smart sensor (LSS) technology. The Rambus LSS technology represents a fundamentally new approach to sensing that shifts the function of traditional optics to computation, eliminating the need for expensive lenses. By replacing traditional sensor refraction optics with lensless diffraction and computation, LSS technology enables ultra-miniature form-factor and low-power design, ideal for a wide range of Internet of Things (IoT) applications.
“Our work with lensless smart sensors through the POD program is helping to pave the way for innovations that are sure to inspire and become ubiquitous throughout our lives,” said Andrew Zimmerman, president of frog. “The opportunity to partner with Rambus, through our R&D platform frogLabs™ and other organizations, to build out the burgeoning sensor ecosystem means we are helping to propel solutions that can be adopted much more quickly.”
“Opening its innovative lensless smart technology to the developer community enables Rambus to promote what promises to be a robust, intelligent ecosystem around this new approach to sensing and imaging,” said Dr. Reto Wettach, founder and design director with IXDS. “We are proud to be among the inaugural POD partners and look forward to being among the first contributors to identify and expand upon existing IoT-based applications for this technology.”
The Rambus lensless smart sensor technology consists of spiral grating diffractive optics and computational algorithms that enable reduced computation times and superior design flexibility, delivering more data and improved accuracy versus current sensors comparable in size, power and cost. The combination of spiral grating diffractive optics and computational algorithms provide high fidelity output for greater accuracy and more sophisticated capabilities in the areas of gesture recognition, depth and range tracking, point finding and advanced object recognition.
“With the need for smart sensors growing, our engineers have invented novel ways to become the eyes of the IoT,” said Gary Bronner, vice president of Rambus Labs. “Our Partners-in-Open-Development provides a great opportunity for innovators to develop technology for a smarter world. With this program, we encourage developers across the globe to join in to create new products that introduce real-world IoT applications that will touch so many parts of our lives. This is the first step toward expanding the accessibility of an ecosystem that will foster a new generation of innovation.”
As part of the POD program, Rambus has identified four key verticals to accelerate and amplify discovery of smart applications, which include cities, transportation, manufacturing and medical. To learn more about Rambus, lensless smart sensors and the Partners-in-Open-Development program, visit rambus.com/smartsensors.
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Rambus brings invention to market. Our customizable IP cores, architecture licenses, tools, services, and training improve the competitive advantage of our customer’s products while accelerating their time-to-market. Rambus products and innovations capture, secure and move data. For more information, visit rambus.com.
Rambus kicked off Mobile World Congress 2015 by announcing its newly minted lensless smart sensor (LSS) POD (Partners in Open Development) program.
“Individuals and companies designing sensors for the rapidly evolving Internet of Things (IoT) are often forced to code complex algorithms from the ground up,” Kendra De Berti, a director at Rambus, told us on the sidelines of MWC 2015 in Barcelona.
“Our POD program will offer partners early access to LSS hardware along with optimized algorithms.”
Pioneered by Rambus scientists, LSS is roughly analogous to the way a human, animal or insect brain perceives the world: the real-time interpretation of a scene or object facilitated by inherent pattern recognition capabilities. Simply put, data leaving a human retina looks nothing like a map of light intensity, although it contains all the information required to interpret an image.
Similarly, LSS allows sensors to capture information-rich images using a low-cost phase grating. Although the raw ‘snap’ is indecipherable to the naked human eye, the sensor, which is approximately the size of pinhead, is capable of capturing all of the information in the visual world up to a certain resolution.
According to De Berti, the lensless smart sensor POD program will focus initially on five key “smart” verticals: consumer, cities, transportation, manufacturing and the medical market.
“Simple-function, sensor-laden endpoints will become ubiquitous as new layers of smart infrastructure go online. Each environmentally aware ‘lite’ endpoint will likely be tasked with capturing, analyzing and transferring data to various devices and the cloud,” she said.
“Although basic endpoints require less computing power than current mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets, they still need to meet stringent compute and low-power specifications – perhaps even lasting weeks on a single charge. That is why Rambus is offering POD participants early access to its tiny, low-power lensless sensors that measure less than the width of a human hair, yet pack an extended depth of field and enhanced accuracy for ubiquitous smart vision.”
As LSS co-inventor Dr. Patrick R. Gill notes, the spiral grating of LSS diffractive optics (hardware), coupled with sophisticated computational algorithms (software), effectively reduces computation time while facilitating application-specific design flexibility.
“Computation is pushed past the ‘edge’ and performed on the LSS sensors themselves. However, unlike traditional PIR sensors that are only capable of detecting a general event such as motion, LSS algorithms can be tailored to monitor and even ‘decipher’ what is being captured,” he explained.
“In addition, LSS delivers more data (128 bits x 128 bits versus two bits x two bits), along with improved accuracy. In practical terms, this enables near infinite depth-of-field and eliminates the need for autofocus.”
The LSS shield and accompanying SDK will ship to a number of Rambus partners later this year, including Frog and IXDS. The kit offers support for multiple Maker boards, such as the Raspberry Pi, Intel Galileo and Arduino.
Interested in learning more about the technology behind Rambus lensless smart sensors? You can check out our LSS article archive here.
On March 3rd, Rambus CMO Jerome Nadel will participate in 4YFN’s MWC 2015 panel discussion about the Internet of Things (IoT), smart sensors and the evolution of smart cities.
On March 3rd, Rambus CMO Jerome Nadel will participate in 4YFN’s MWC 2015 panel discussion about the Internet of Things (IoT), smart sensors and the evolution of smart cities.
Additional 4YFN panelists include Cisco CTO John Baekelmans, MLOVE Founder and Curator Harald Neidhardt, Intel Human Computer Interaction Expert Mara Balestrini and D4SC Designer-Founder Priya Prakash.
It should be noted that a growing number of cities across the globe have already allocated a significant amount of funds to track traffic flow, energy use and pollution. For example, Barcelona smart city sensors monitor everything from noise and humidity to pollution and traffic congestion.
“In addition to being used by the city, the data is made available publicly,” writes Fortune’s Shalene Gupta. “Businesses have tapped into that information to build apps that show public transit arrival times and let gardeners check which plants to water and when.”
Unsurprisingly, the number of smart cities worldwide is set to quadruple over the next 12 years, with local governments and the private sector collaborating to address a multitude of challenges confronting urban centers.
As Nadel recently told Rambus Press, smart cities will be built on the new digital infrastructure enabled by ubiquitous connectivity, smart sensors and hardened security.
“These are the basic foundations of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the elements that enable the chain of ‘capture, secure, move,’ from the sensor through the cloud to the end user. Smart sensors, secure transmission, and performant movement of data, coupled with applications and analytics, is what makes cities smart,” Nadel explained. “That is why 4YFN’s MWC 2015 panel will discuss how to ensure secure feature management and provisioning of sensor end-points in the field, as well as new disruptive sensor technologies that are ultra small, extremely low power and super low cost.”
Interested in learning more about smart cities and the Internet of Things? You can check out our IoT story archive here.
Inspired by the innovative thinking at the heart of Rambus Labs, we translate extraordinary theory into everyday practice, imagining exciting new ways to interpret and reimagine the world of data around us.
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