[6] On October 6, 2009, it was announced that he would share the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics for "the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit – the CCD sensor, which has become an electronic eye in almost all areas of photography".

[7] Born in Amherst, Nova Scotia, on August 19, 1924, Boyle was the son of a medical doctor and moved to Quebec with his father and mother Bernice when he was less than two.

[8] He was home schooled by his mother until age fourteen, when he attended Montreal's Lower Canada College to complete his secondary education.

[8] Boyle attended McGill University, but his education was interrupted in 1943, when he joined the Royal Canadian Navy during World War II.

"[11] Eugene Gordon and Mike Tompsett, two now-retired colleagues from Bell labs, claim that its application to photography was not invented by Boyle.