Willard Sterling Boyle & George Elwood Smith of the U.S.A., inventors of the Charged-Coupled Device (CCD) digital image sensor was awarded a Nobel Prize in Physics today.

for the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit – the CCD sensor

The award & the SEK 10 million award money is also shared with Charles Kuen Kao, a Shanghai born scientist from the Standard Telecommunication Laboratories for the his breakthrough in the fiber optics use for telecommunication.

You can find the official announcement and for the scientists in you, here’s the Scientific Background Paper (PDF).

Update: YouTube video from 1978 of the two scientists announcing the CCD /via Alcatel-Lucent blog.