"Our approach gives a low-power route to the depth imaging of ordinary, small targets at very long range, " said Aongus McCarthy, a research fellow at Heriot-Watt.
The chips will include an 800-megahertz ARM central processor--the same power-sipping design powering many smart phones--with a high-definition video processor, an imaging processor, an audio processor and a tiny, low-power version of the GeForce graphics processors Nvidia pushes for desktop and laptop computers.