Prof. Zhiyong FAN's Article on Bioinspired Bionic Eye Published in Nature Materials
Prof. Zhiyong FAN, Chair Professor of Electronic & Computer Engineering and Chemical & Biological Engineering, has published his groundbreaking research in Nature Materials titled “An aberration-corrected bionic eye for full-colour vision and event-driven motion detection”.
His team developed a new bioinspired bionic eye system based on a hemispherical tandem artificial retina. This high-curvature image sensor achieves a pixel density of 1,905 ppi with 367,500 total pixels, providing full-colour imaging across the visible band (300–800 nm) and an aberration-corrected field of view exceeding 160°. Since sensor array fabrication on curved substrates cannot be completed using conventional lithography, the team developed a novel 3D laser fabrication approach to realize device fabrication on hemispherical substrates. This breakthrough successfully increased the pixel scale from 100 (achieved in their 2020 Nature paper) to nearly 400,000, representing a massive step forward toward practical application. The team aims to realize one-million-pixel devices by 2027.
This major milestone was achieved in collaboration with researchers from Mainland China, Hong Kong, and the United States. The paper's first author, Dr. Zhenghao LONG, is Prof. Fan's former PhD student who was recently awarded the "Outstanding Young Overseas Scholar Fund" by the NSFC in 2025 and has joined Fudan University as an Assistant Professor.
This publication adds to a highly successful year of breakthroughs for Prof. Fan's team and their collaborators, who have also recently published or had two papers accepted in Nature Sensors, one in Nature Materials, one in Nature Protocols, one in Nature Electronics, and three in Nature Communications.
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