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EE|Times EUROPE 53

MARKET & TECHNOLOGY TRENDS
Israeli Startup Democratizes Hyperspectral

Imaging

By Anne-Françoise Pelé

ameras are critical components of the drive to enable the Israeli startup Unispectral says it has
autonomy and increase the safety of vehicles, drones, and
robots. Near-infrared (NIR) cameras are rapidly enhancing developed a solution to turn any low-cost IR
Cmachine-vision capabilities and are essential to a range of camera into a hyperspectral camera.
inspection applications. Israeli startup Unispectral says it has devel-
oped a solution that includes a miniature tunable NIR filter and
image-processing software to turn any low-cost IR camera into a applied on the upper mirror holder, the optical cavity changes to allow
hyperspectral camera. only a desired IR wavelength to pass.
Promising startups pop up every day, and it is not always easy to Peleg Levin, CTO of Unispectral, explained the concept at an IEEE
spot them, especially when they emerge several thousand kilometers MEMS Conference. “In our design, we have a movable mirror that has
away. Alissa Fitzgerald, founder of microelectromechanical-system one set of electrodes and another set of electrodes that are exterior to
design and development house A.M. Fitzgerald and Associates, brought the optical gap,” said Levin. “When we apply the actuation voltage, the
Unispectral (Tel Aviv) to EE Times Europe’s attention. The startup was optical gap increases instead of decreasing, and since we can design
noteworthy, Fitzgerald said, because it had “released a spectral camera this electrostatic gap to be much greater than the optical gap, we can
suitable for the mass market, and the MEMS technology makes this allow a very large tunable range of the optical gap itself.”
product smartphone-sized instead of a tabletop instrument.” An inter- The filter is manufactured on a full wafer-level technology to provide
view with Ariel Raz, Unispectral co-founder and CEO, soon followed. a component ready for mounting and integrating with the camera
Admittedly, there are plenty of spectral cameras today, but they assembly and device controllers, according to the company.
are large, complex, expensive and suitable for high-end equipment in
labs. Unispectral’s goal has been to develop high-end spectral cameras FROM SEEING TO SENSING
accessible for the mass market. As the camera megapixel race was nearing its end, Tel Aviv University
EE professor David Mendlovic and Raz, who was then his doctoral
HIGHER-DIMENSIONAL COLOR SPACE student, realized that the combination of spectral analysis and imaging
Human color vision is trichromatic. Every color we see is the product would “create something very powerful,” Raz told EE Times Europe.
of signals generated by solely three types of photoreceptor cells in the In 2016, the researchers patented an optical component based on
retina. Our vision is thus organized into — and limited to — a three- existing MEMS technology and established Unispectral. Four years later,
dimensional color space. the company announced the availability of an evaluation kit for its
IMAGE: SHUTTERSTOCK human vision into a high-dimensional color space. Think of all the hid- into 700- to 950-nm spectral cameras, according to the startup.
tunable NIR filter, now named ColorIR, which turns low-cost IR cameras
Now imagine a device, such as a smartphone, that could extend
More recently, Unispectral introduced the Monarch spectral IR cam-
den information that could surface and play a critical role in our daily
era, which integrates its tunable Fabry–Pérot filter with a miniature
lives. One way of doing that is hyperspectral imaging.
IR camera module in a 60 × 40 × 14.5-mm, 30-gram camera. The unit
Unispectral says it has developed a new concept of a tunable
connects via a USB cable to an Android smartphone, a PC, or the main
Fabry–Pérot NIR filter. Its design mounts an array of vapor-coated
mirrors on a MEMS assembly. With controlled changes of the voltage
processor of an OEM platform.
www.eetimes.eu | SEPTEMBER 2021