New Laser Triangulation Sensor Offers Unique Combination of Size, Speed and Accuracy for a Wide Range of Control and Automation Tasks.

Ideally suited for both dynamic and high resolution measurement tasks, it features a completely new compact sensor housing with innovative mounting sleeves that ensures a repeatable sensor position and alignment to the target. Researchers at Helmholtz Zentrum Munchen and TUM capitalized on the advantages of those miniaturized photonic circuits and built the world's smallest ultrasound detector: the silicon waveguide-etalon detector, or SWED. However, the increase in sensitivity is inversely proportional to the diameter and for that reason, sensors with high sensitivity have been reported but posing issues on the sensor manipulation due the fragile nature of the structures. "This is the first time that a detector smaller than the size of a blood cell is used to detect ultrasound using the silicon photonics technology", says Rami Shnaiderman, developer of SWED. "If a piezoelectric detector was miniaturized to the scale of SWED, it would be 100 million times less sensitive.". [Extracted from the article]