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9 November 2001

A New Sensor Chip

By Peter Baum

I discovered a very interesting chip you might be interested in that is made by Pacific Silicon Sensor out of Westlake Village, CA (www.pacific-sensor.com). They make a relatively inexpensive ("From $43" according to Electronic Products) sensor that produces an output voltage directly proportional to the wavelength of light from 450 to 900 nm. Resolution can be as high as .01 nm! There are some caveats. The light needs to be monochromatic (unless you want some kind of average) and the device has to be calibrated. Still, this inexpensive device has sparked my imagination... looking at small frequency shifts in various experiments or perhaps simplifying the construction of a spectrometer since you could read out the frequency directly. (You would need another sensor for the amplitude.)