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JULY 2024 I DESIGN007 MAGAZINE 57 down the path we are collectively on. Fortu- nately, there are lots of solutions bubbling up. (See my ideas on how to integrate thermal solutions into aluminum rigid-flex designs in my short book "Solderless Assembly For Elec- tronics.") In summary, mechatronics is, in essence, a multidisciplinary field of design and manu- facture that combines elements of mechanical engineering, electrical/electronics engineer- ing, computing, and motion control engineer- ing to design and create intelligent systems for a never-ending stream of products that serve to make our current and future lives better, safer, and more enjoyable. DESIGN007 Joe Fjelstad is founder and CEO of Verdant Electronics and an international author- ity and innovator in the field of electronic interconnection and packaging technologies with more than 185 patents issued or pending. To read past columns or contact Fjelstad, click here. Download your free copy of Fjelstad's book Flexible Circuit Technology, 4th Edition, and watch his in-depth workshop series "Flexible Circuit Technology." Researchers have demonstrated a new intelli- gent photonic sensing-computing chip that can pro- cess, transmit and reconstruct images of a scene within nanoseconds. This advance opens the door to extremely high-speed image processing that could benefit edge intelligence for machine vision applications such as autonomous driving, industrial inspection and robotic vision. Edge computing, which performs intensive com- puting tasks like image processing and analysis on local devices, is evolving into edge intelligence by adding artificial intelligence (AI) driven analysis and decision-making. "Capturing, processing and analyzing images for edge- based tasks such as auton- omous driving is currently limited to millisecond-level speeds due to the necessity of optical-to-electronic con- versions," said research team leader Lu Fang from Tsinghua University in China. "Our new chip can perform all these pro- cesses in just nanoseconds by keeping them all in the optical domain. This could be used to significantly enhance, or even replace, the traditional archi- tecture of sensor acquisition followed by AI post- processing." "The chip and optical neural network could boost the efficiency of processing complex scenes in industrial inspection and help advance intelligent robot technology to a higher level of cognitive intel- ligence," said Wei Wu, co-first author of the paper. "We think it could also revolutionize edge intelli- gence." The challenge in performing both image acqui- sition and analysis on the same chip in the optical domain is finding a way to convert the free-space spatial light used for imag- ing into an on-chip guided light wave. The researchers achieved this by designing a chip that consists of a sensing- computing array of dedicated designed ring resonators that convert a free-space optical intensity image—a 2D repre- sentation of a scene's light intensity—into a coherent light signal that can then be guided on the chip. A micro-lens array e n h a n c e s t h e p r o c e s s b y focusing the scene onto the OPCA chip. (Source: Optica) Photonic Chip Integrates Sensing and Computing for Ultrafast Machine Vision