Optacon Integrated Circuit Development
In the 1960s, when the Optacon was being developed, integrated circuitry was in its infancy, and no suitable integrated solid state arrays of photo detectors was available. The earliest complete Optacon-like reading aids were built at Stanford and SRI with a lens system that focused the images from the printed page on a fiber optic bundle with individual fibers connected to discrete phototransistors. Not only was this system large and bulky, it was expensive and difficult to assemble. An effort was launched to develop a monolithic silicon retina with an array of 24-by-6 phototransistors about the size of one letter space so simple optics with no magnification could be used. Basic research in integrated circuit technology available at that time had to be conducted, resulting in Ph.D. theses by several Stanford graduate students, including J. S. Brugler, J. D Plummer, R. D. Melen, and P. Salsbury. The phototransistors had to be sufficiently sensitive, fast enough for the required refresh rate, have a spectral response appropriate for detecting ink on paper, in a closely packed matrix without blind spots, and interconnected so only connections to the rows and columns were needed.
The successful fabrication of such a silicon retina was a major milestone toward a practical Optacon.
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