The tiny camera inside your smartphone traces its roots to a government research laboratory – and to a federal law that helped turn an experimental technology into something billions of people now use.

In the 1990s, I led a team developing a new approach to digital imaging while working at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Our “camera-on-a-chip” condensed much of a camera’s technology onto a semiconductor. The resulting complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) image sensor eventually found its way into everything from phones and computers to cars and medical devices.

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