Albert Brault

Albert Thomas Brault (born May 24, 1937) is an American chemist who invented the fabrication process used for the first integral color image sensors. The curator of the Technology Collection at the George Eastman Museum, Todd Gustavson, has stated that "the color sensor technology developed by Albert Brault has revolutionized all forms of color photography. These color sensors are now ubiquitous in products such as smart phone cameras, digital cameras and camcorders, digital cinema cameras, medical cameras, automobile cameras, and drones".

Early life and education Brault was born in Barton, Vermont, the son of Innocence Elizabeth and Maurice Albert Brault. He attended Cathedral High School in Springfield, Massachusetts. He distinguished himself by graduating magna cum laude from Saint Michaels College in Winooski, Vermont in 1959, and received a PhD in Physical Chemistry from Northwestern University in 1964. Dillon had already asked his Kodak colleague Bryce Bayer to determine what color pattern to use, and had developed the signal processing technique needed to produce a full color image for video display. The remaining challenge Dillon faced was how to fabricate the Color Filter Array (CFA) he had envisioned. The collaboration that Brault so dearly wanted was born at that moment.

Brault's knowledge and experience enabled him to quickly recognize that a CFA meeting Dillon's requirements could be fabricated using sublimable dyes deposited onto a suitable substrate through photo-resist masks. depicts Brault's process for fabricating integral color filters. After a wafer of monochrome sensors is fabricated, a polymer and a photoresist (shown in yellow) was coated on top. Since Kodak was manufacturing photoresists at the time, Brault was familiar with this technology. The photoresist was exposed through a mask, and the sublimable dye (shown in green) was transferred by vapor deposition into the polymer. The photoresist was removed, and the process was repeated for the red and blue filters.

Since Kodak had not yet developed working CCD image sensors, Brault fabricated the first CFA on a small glass plate.

Career transition Brault's career pivoted to human resource management in 1978. He held the position of director of human resource management for the Kodak Research Laboratories and the Life Sciences Business Group. He later served as the executive director of the Center for Advanced Human Resource Studies at Cornell University from 1989 to 1996, and the Senior Human Resource Executive at the University of Rochester from 1996 to 2001.

After retiring in 2001, Brault wrote a book entitled, "Human Resources Adding Value in Higher Education", for which he received the distinguished Kathryn G. Hansen Publication Award from CUPA in 2004.

Technical honors and awards

Albert Brault and Peter Dillon both received Technology and Engineering Emmy Awards in 2019 for "Pioneering Development of the Single-Chip Color Camera". In 2022, they received the IEEE Masaru Ibuka Consumer Electronics Award for "Contributions to the development of image sensors with integrated color filter arrays for digital video and still cameras".