Rambus presented a lens-free camera that is said to be significantly cheaper and smaller than these tiniest imagers. The company created an 80um diffractive grating from which it was able to reconstruct a poor but visible image of the Mona Lisa. The technique requires significant computation to deliver even a blurry image, however the company sees an initial opportunity to enter the market as a thermal camera. The Mona Lisa picture required computation on the order of 350 million multiple-accumulates.
Rambus got its first experimental results back in August and it aims to publish the results soon.
Update: The presentation slides can be downloaded here.
