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Willard Boyle: Moving Charge Along a Chain

By Infinite Creation · Profile

At a Glance

Willard Sterling Boyle (1924-2011) co-conceived the charge-coupled device with George E. Smith at Bell Labs in 1969, reportedly in about an hour at a blackboard. It was intended as a memory device. Its importance turned out to be as an image sensor. Boyle and Smith shared half the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics with Charles Kao.

Lived: 1924-2011, Canada, worked in the United States
Anchor year: 1969, the CCD conceived
Strand: canon

Career

The problem as it stood

Bell Labs was pursuing bubble memory and wanted a competing semiconductor approach. Separately, electronic imaging still depended on camera tubes: bulky, fragile, prone to burn-in and lag, and requiring warm-up.

What he actually did

Boyle and Smith devised a structure in which packets of charge are held in potential wells under electrodes on a semiconductor surface and shifted from one well to the next by clocking the electrode voltages in sequence, an analogue shift register.

How it worked

For imaging, light falling on each site generates charge in proportion to the illumination, which accumulates during the exposure. Clocking then marches every packet along the chain to a single output amplifier, which reads them in order. One amplifier for the whole sensor means excellent uniformity: no site is read differently from any other.

What it made possible

Solid-state imaging: camcorders, digital stills, astronomy, medical imaging and eventually the replacement of film in cinema. Notably, the CCD works on charge storage: the same principle Tihanyi patented in 1926 for the iconoscope, reimplemented in silicon.

What happened to him

He had earlier co-invented the first continuously operating ruby laser and worked on the Apollo programme selecting lunar landing sites. He returned to Nova Scotia and died in 2011.

Where the credit landed

The 2009 Nobel citation for the CCD went to Boyle and Smith, and it was contested: Eugene Gordon and Michael Tompsett argued publicly that the Nobel work was the imaging application, which was Tompsett's, rather than the charge-transfer concept. Boyle and Smith did conceive the device. Whether the imaging achievement the prize cited was theirs is a live disagreement, and this corpus profiles Tompsett separately for that reason.

Known For

The CCD was conceived as a memory device, not a sensor.
One output amplifier for the whole sensor is why CCDs are so uniform.
It works on charge storage: Tihanyi's 1926 principle, in silicon.

Knowledge Base

What You'll Learn

The idea that ended film was sketched in an hour and aimed at a different problem entirely.

Why charge storage keeps reappearing

Tihanyi patented it in 1926 for camera tubes. The iconoscope and its successors used it. The CCD and CMOS sensors use it now. The reason is unchanged: reading a picture element only at the instant of scanning collects a vanishing fraction of the available light, while letting each site accumulate charge across the whole frame collects nearly all of it. Every sensitive imaging device ever built has had to solve this, and they have all solved it the same way.

Where This Fits

The CCD moved capture onto a chip, the first link in the chain traced in A History of Broadcast Technology.

FAQ

Q: What is a CCD?
A: A charge-coupled device: a semiconductor structure holding packets of charge in potential wells and shifting them along by clocking electrode voltages. For imaging, each site accumulates charge in proportion to light, and the packets are marched to a single output amplifier.

Q: Was the CCD Nobel Prize contested?
A: Yes. Eugene Gordon and Michael Tompsett argued publicly that the imaging application the prize cited was Tompsett's work rather than Boyle and Smith's, though Boyle and Smith conceived the charge-transfer device itself.

Sources

The patent was checked against the record. Checked 20 August 2026.

US Patent 3,858,232, Information Storage Devices. Filed 9 November 1971 and granted 31 December 1974, assigned to Bell Telephone Laboratories. It names Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith jointly, matching the shared credit described above. The filing postdates the 1969 blackboard session, so it documents the device rather than dating the idea.