The European Space Agency (ESA) has awarded Teledyne e2v with the second phase of a €42M ($47M) contract to produce visible light CCDs for the PLATO (Planetary Transits and Oscillations of stars) mission.

MDPI Sensors publishes a paper "Multilayer Black Phosphorus Near-Infrared Photodetectors" by Chaojian Hou, Lijun Yang, Bo Li, Qihan Zhang, Yuefeng Li, Qiuyang Yue, Yang Wang, Zhan Yang, and Lixin Dong from Harbin Institute of Technology (China), Michigan State University (USA), and Soochow Universit...

EETimes Junko Yoshida publishes an explanation of Mobileye self-driving car demo where the car passes a junction on red light:"The public AV demo in Jerusalem inadvertently allowed a local TV station’s video camera to capture Mobileye’s car running a red light.

Lucid Vision Labs publishes nice animations explaining how Sony readout with dual analog/digital CDS works:Sony Exmor rolling shutter sensorSame pipeline but with global shutter (Pregius)1st stage - analog domain CDS2nd stage - digital domain CDSThere are few more animations on the company's site an...

Canon's EF-M 11-22mm is an ultra-wide zoom lens for EOS mirrorless cameras with APSC sensors, upon which it delivers an 18-35mm equivalent range, making it ideal for landscape, architecture, large group shots or vlogging at arm's length. Find out more in my review-so-far.

Samsung System LSI Investor Presentation dated by April 30, 2018 shows the company success in image sensor business:1/3 Global Smartphones use ISOCELL image sensors4.

Imec: Holst Centre, a joint initiative of imec and TNO, have demonstrated a new class of flexible, large-area sensor technology for detecting finger- and palmprints. At less than 0.

Omron publishes a video demoing its low-resolution thermopile sensor:

The Olympus 17mm f1.2 PRO is a bright wide lens, aimed at Olympus and Panasonic mirrorless owners who want the best performance and fastest aperture at this flexible focal length. Check out my video overview and sample images!… The post Olympus 17mm f1.

The Fujifilm Instax SQ6 is an analogue instant camera that looks like the classic Instagram logo. It's Fujifilm's second instant camera to use the Instax Square format that outputs 2.4x2.4in prints, but unlike last year's digital SQ10, embraces the analogue process. Check out my preview.

The Irish Times times publishes an article on ON Semi acquisition of SensL:"Financial details of the transaction have not been disclosed but industry insiders told The Irish Times it was a “high double-digit deal”.

University of Wisconsin–Madison publishes a video "CamPUF: Physically Unclonable Function based on CMOS Image Sensor Fixed Pattern Noise" by Yongwoo Lee, Kyuin Lee, and Younghyun Kim presented at Design Automation Conference (DAC) 2018:

Korean news agency Yonhap gives its view on Sony and Samsung market shares, also quoted by Business Standard and MSN:"Sony and Samsung currently lead the global market for CMOS image sensors, with the Japanese rival holding a slight edge.In 2016, Sony and Samsung took up 25.6 percent and 22.

BusinessWire: ON Semi expands its manufacturing facility in Rochester, NY. The site develops and manufactures image sensors for commercial, industrial and professional imaging applications, including machine vision, surveillance, traffic monitoring, medical and scientific imaging, and photography.

A number of on-line sources quote SuggestPhone site on the specs of the oncoming Qualcomm 700 series of mid-range Snapdragon processors. The add support for triple cameras, as well as AI processing accelerators:DPReview reports that 2019 iPhone might have a triple camera too.

European Imaging & Sensing Summit to be held in Grenoble, France on Sept.

A BBC reporter has been given a demo of China's state-wide face recognition capabilities:

MPDI Special Issue Depth Sensors and 3D Vision publishes University of Siegen, Germany, paper "Pulse Based Time-of-Flight Range Sensing" by Hamed Sarbolandi, Markus Plack, and Andreas Kolb.

PRNewswire: AEye introduces a new sensor data type called Dynamic Vixels. In simple terms, Dynamic Vixels combine pixels from digital 2D cameras with voxels from AEye's Agile 3D LiDAR sensor into a single super-resolution sensor data type.

The Fujifilm X-T100 is an entry-level mirrorless camera, aimed at beginners, social photographers and vloggers, sporting a 24 Megapixel APSC sensor, built-in viewfinder, tilting touchscreen that can flip sideways to face the subject, 4k video, Bluetooth and Wifi.

NHK Open House to be held on May 24-27 exhibits an 8K avalanche-multiplying crystalline selenium image sensor:"Electric charge generated by incident light are increased by avalanche multiplication phenomenon inside the photoelectric conversion film.

Sony IR Day 2018 held on May 22 (today) has quite a detailed presentation on its semiconductor business targets and strategy.

Electronic Imaging Symposium publishes a keynote "Sub-Electron Low-Noise CMOS Image Sensors: Large Format, Fast, 0.5e-rms CIS with Oversampled 2‐Stage ADCs" by J. A. Segovia, F. Medeiro, A. Gonzales, A. Vellegas, and A. Rodriguez-Vazquez, Teledyne-Anafocus and Universidad de Sevilla.

ST Micro 2018 Capital Markets Day was used to present the company focus on all types of 3D imaging: SPAD-based FlightSense, structured light (probably Apple Face ID IR sensor), and also indirect ToF:

Framos SLVS-EC RX IP Core shortens design time with the latest generation of Sony image sensors. The SLVS-EC interface (Scalable Low-Voltage Signaling with Embedded Clock) has up to 8 lanes and 2.376 Gbps throughput per lane.

iniVation, a spin-off of the University of Zurich and the ETH Zurich, launches its next-generation event-based DAVIS346 sensor with USB3 interface. It features over twice the resolution and a 30% smaller compared with previous models.

PRNewswire: OmniVision collaborates with Smart Eye to integrate its automotive 2MP image sensor with Smart Eye's sensing algorithm library in a turnkey driver and cabin monitoring solution that targets automotive OEMs.

CEI makes available for purchase 3 videos with Albert Theuwissen lectures:Introduction to Correlated and Uncorrelated Noise in ImagersCharacterization of Noise in DarkCharacterization of Noise with Light

The Panasonic Lumix FT7 / TS7 is the company's latest rugged waterproof compact. Waterproof to 31 metres, It replaces the Lumix FT5 / TS5 with an updated 20.4 Megapixel sensor, a stabilised 4.6x zoom and, for the first time on an FT model, a built in 1,170k dot electronic viewfinder.

GlobeNewswire: Himax updates on its imaging business with the new focus on 3D imaging and new product - under-display optical fingerprint sensors:"Himax SLiMTM 3D sensing solution for premium Android smartphone is mass production ready in Q1 2018 as planned, awaits smartphone makers and their ecosys...

IC Insights reports "The spread of digital camera applications in vehicles, machine vision, human recognition and security systems, as well as for more powerful camera phones will drive CMOS image sensor sales to an eighth straight record-high level this year with worldwide revenues growing 10% to $...

SensL publishes SiPM explaining video in its new capacity of a part of ON Semi Imaging group:

SeekingAlpha publishes TowerJazz Q1 2018 earnings call transcript with update on the foundry's image sensor business:"In the CMOS image sensor business unit, where we see recently very good results of our smallest in the world 2.

PRNewswire: Microsoft announces its latest 3D ToF camera: "A new initiative, Project Kinect for Azure — a package of sensors from Microsoft that contains our unmatched time of flight depth camera, with onboard compute, in a small, power-efficient form factor — designed for AI on the Edge.

MDPI Special Issue Special Issue on the 2017 International Image Sensor Workshop (IISW) publishes Olympus paper "Multiband Imaging CMOS Image Sensor with Multi-Storied Photodiode Structure" Yoshiaki Takemoto, Mitsuhiro Tsukimura, Hideki Kato, Shunsuke Suzuki, Jun Aoki, Toru Kondo, Haruhisa Saito, Yu...

Qualcomm 10nm Snapdragon 710 processors features a number of advanced imaging features:Qualcomm Spectra 250 ISP2nd Generation Spectra architecture14-bit image signal processingUp to 32MP single cameraUp to 20MP dual cameraCan connect up to 6 different cameras (many configurations possible)Multi-Fram...

SystemPlus reverse engineering shows a difference between iPhone X color sensors and other AMS spectral sensors:

BusinessWire: Baltimore, MD-based Pixelligent's Zirconium oxide capped nanoparticles (ZrO2), a high refractive index inorganic material, with a sub-10 nm diameter with functionalized surface, is said to have a potential to contribute to sensitivity of CMOS image sensors. The company announces $7.

Hamamatsu publishes a nice article "Photonics for advanced car technologies" showing many applications for its light sensors:

Electronic Imaging publishes Omnivision keynote presentation "Automotive Image Sensors" by Boyd Fowler and Johannes Solhusvik.

MSN, DPReview: Machine learning is often presented as a tool to improve high-ISO.

Digitimes: If Huawei is doing well with its P20 Pro smartphone with triple camera, other smartphone makers like Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo, Lenovo, Asustek, HTC, and Sony are likely to come with similar solutions too, according to Digitimes sources.

December 2017 Leti presentation on 3D integration at IEDM Workshop talks about a number of opportunities for CIS:

LFoundry 2017 report contains interesting info about the foundry, its customers, and the relationships with its mother company SMIC:"The year began with the clear, challenging objective of equipping the Avezzano plant with further, alternative production capacity compared to its traditional focus on...

Mydrivers: A number of Chinese news sites cover Oppo May 10th meeting devoted to the company work on the 3D sensing for smartphones.

Spectronet publishes a presentation of Bernd Jähne from Universität Heidelberg on image sensor characterization with some interesting findings on PRNU wavelength dependence, QE, angular dependencies, interesting MTF shapes, etc:

Nikkei: Subaru adds its first "driver monitoring system (DMS)" to the US model of the "Forester" mid-size SUV.

GlobeNewswire: TowerJazz and Newsight Imaging announced production of Newsight’s CIS chips and camera modules, customized for very high volume LiDAR and machine vision markets, combining sensors, digital algorithms and pixel array on the same chip.

BusinessWire: ON Semiconductor acquires SensL Technologies Ltd. SensL, based in Ireland, is specializing in Silicon Photomultipliers (SiPM), Single Photon Avalanche Diode (SPAD) and LiDAR sensing products for automotive, medical, industrial and consumer markets.

ArsTechnica compares different LiDAR technologies in a form of interview with Ouster CEO and co-founder Angus Pacala. Ouster develops a spinning mechanical LiDAR similar to Velodyne. Angus also co-founded Quanergy, so that he was closely involved in solid-stage LiDAR design.