Charge Coupled Devices first developed in the 1960s as memory storage devices. Sensitivity to light suggested imaging possibilities. Her briefly focus on History of CCDs; How do CCDs work and Advantages of CCD. A charge-coupled device is a light-sensitive integrated circuit that stores and displays the data for an image in such a way that each pixel (picture element) in the image is converted into an electical charge the intensity of which is related to a color in the color spectrum.