A highly miniaturized, battery operated, commandable, digital wireless camera

This paper discusses the design, development, testing, and demonstration of a highly miniaturized battery operated, digital wireless camera. The miniature wireless camera receives commands transmitted from a remote base station requesting it to take one or more frames of data, and broadcasts the digital image data to the base station receiver for display. The camera uses a complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) active pixel image sensor (APS) that achieves noise performance comparable to a charge-coupled device (CCD) with orders of magnitude better power consumption performance. The image sensor is integrated with a wireless communications transceiver, antennas and batteries into a stand alone miniature package. The results of a three year development effort are described