DB Hitek (former Dongbu) foundry develops SPAD and GS pixels, as shown on its recent roadmap:

EETimes reporter Junko Yoshida publishes a 10 page-long article "Jury Still Out on 3D Sensing for Smartphones" mostly based on an interview with Pierre Cambou, Yole Developpement analyst.

SmartSens reports that it has closed a new investment round of "tens of millions of dollars". The lead investor is the National Core Industry Investment Fund (Big Fund), the Beijing Core Dynamic Energy Investment Fund, and venture capital institutions such as Lenovo Venture Capital Group.

Optics.

Sharp and Socle/Foxconn come up with ST-like SPAD ToF proximity sensor, the MTOF171000C0. Sharp also makes a similar ToF proximity device, the GP2AP01VT10F, with quite a detailed spec. Application guide is available on Github. The samples are supposed to be available in August 2018.

Ouster presentation at Autonomous Vehicle Sensors Conference held in Jan Jose, CA in June 2018 defines the requirements to LiDARs and proposes their realistic measurement conditions, so that different products and technologies can be compared:Links to few other interesting presentations at the confe...

TowerJazz-Panasonic publishes the parameters of pixels it offers to its customers:1.

I missed this news at the time. On Dec 1, 2017, Superpix announced "the most competitive 80,000 image sensor chip SP0821" that costs just 6.8 cents. The sensor is based on 2.

Mediatek AI-based face recognition is said to be "10% more accurate than anything that has been done before:"

IEEE SSCS publishes an interesting interview with Albert Theuwissen taken at ISSCC 2018 and talking about early days of imaging at Philips, IISS, IISW, Harvest Imaging company and Forum and more.

Globes: Israeli 3D sensing company Mantis Vision completes the acquisition of Jackson Hole, Utah-based Alces Technology. The newspaper's sources suggest the acquisition was for about $10m. Earlier this month Mantis Vision raised $55m bringing its total investment to $84m.

4th International Workshop on Image Sensors and Imaging Systems (IWISS2018) is to be held on November 28-29 at Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan.

BusinessWire: SensibleVision, a developer of 3D face authentication solutions, criticized Microsoft President Brad Smith's call for government regulation of facial recognition technology:“Why would Smith single out this one technology for external oversight and not all biometrics methods?” asks ...

A Total Lunar Eclipse is one of Nature's most spectacular displays and a great deal easier to photograph than a Solar Eclipse, not to mention more frequent too.

Microsoft President Brad Smith writes in the company blog: "Advanced technology no longer stands apart from society; it is becoming deeply infused in our personal and professional lives. This means the potential uses of facial recognition are myriad.

MDPI Sensors publishes a paper "Toward the Ultimate-High-Speed Image Sensor: From 10 ns to 50 ps" by Anh Quang Nguyen, Vu Truong Son Dao, Kazuhiro Shimonomura, Kohsei Takehara, and Takeharu Goji Etoh from Hanoi University of Science and Technology (Vietnam), Vietnam National University HCMC, Ritsume...

PRNewswire: AIRY3D, a Montreal-based 3D vision start-up, raises $10m in an oversubscribed Series A funding round led by Intel Capital, including all Seed round investors CRCM Ventures, Nautilus Venture Partners, R7 Partners, Robert Bosch Venture Capital (RBVC), and WI Harper Group along with several...

MDPI Sensors publishes "A 12-Gb/s Stacked Dual-Channel Interface for CMOS Image Sensor Systems" paper by Sang-Hoon Kim, Hoon Shin, Youngkyun Jeong, June-Hee Lee, Jaehyuk Choi, and Jung-Hoon Chun from Sungkyunkwan University and Samsung, Korea.

Synopsys publishes a presentation on "Design of Gratings for 3D Depth Sensing" by Tung Yu Su, Richard Hu, and Morgan Lu, Cybernet System Taiwan.

OSA Optics Express publishes a paper "Dynamic range extension for photon counting arrays" by Ivan Michel Antolovic, Claudio Bruschini, and Edoardo Charbon from TU Delft and EPFL.

SmartSens representative, The Hoffman Agency, kindly sent me a more correct translation of the company's article "Let China no longer miss the era of CIS." This comes to replace the half-broken Google translation in my previous post.

Gpixel: A team of CMOS image sensors industry veterans creates Gpixel NV.

Himax quaterly earnings report presents the company's vision of 3D sensing market:"Leading Android smartphone makers are exploring various 3D sensing technologies, namely structured light, active stereo camera (ASC) and, to a lesser extent, time-of-flight (ToF), trying to strike a good balance of co...

Facebook Reality Labs, former Oculus, presents its solutions for mirrors in 3D imaging. Mirrors and other reflective surfaces is a major problem in 3D cameras:"Mirrors are typically skirted around in 3D reconstruction, and most earlier work just ignores them by pretending they don’t exist.

MIPI Alliance has initiated development of a physical layer (up to 15m distance) specification targeted for ADS, ADAS and other surround sensor applications. Initially, the standard supports 12-24 Gbps data rate, with work being under way to extend the speed up to 48 Gbps.MIPI A-PHY v1.

Orbbec reports that the new Oppo Find X smartphone uses Orbbec's structured light 3D camera for face recognition.

Nikkei: The second generation of "Toyota Safety Sense" (TSS2) ADAS switches to Sony image sensors in its monocular camera. The TSS2 was launched in 2018. The automatic braking function of the TSS2 (one of the main functions of the system) now can detect pedestrians at night.

SeekingAlpha: Samsung reports an increase in image sensor sales in Q2 2018 and a strong forecast for both its own image sensor and also the image sensors manufactured at Samsung foundry.

ON Semi renames Image Sensor Group to "Intelligent Sensing Group," suggesting that other businesses might be added to it in search for a revenue growth:The company reports:"During the second quarter, we saw strong demand for our image sensors for ADAS applications.

Japanese IEICE Transactions on Electronics publishes Shoji Kawahito paper "Column-Parallel ADCs for CMOS Image Sensors and Their FoM-Based Evaluations.

Loup Ventures publishes its analysis of LiDAR technologies and how they compete with each other on the market:There is also a comparison of camera, LiDAR and Radar technologies of autonomous vehicles:Another Loup Ventures article tries to answer on question "If a human can drive a car based on visio...

Nikkei: Kyocera presents "Camera-LiDAR Fusion Sensor" to be to commercialize in 2022 or 2023. The sensor uses two kinds of data collected by the camera and LiDAR sensor, respectively, to improve the recognition rate of objects around the sensor. The LiDAR uses MEMS for beam scanning.

The SIgma 105mm f1.4 ART is one of the brightest portrait lenses available, undercutting its only rival from Nikon on price, while giving it a run for its money on performance. Find out if the Bokeh Master is the best portrait lens in our Sigma 105mm f1.4 review!… The post Sigma 105mm f1.

Sony announces 1/2-inch IMX586 stacked CMOS sensor for smartphones featuring 48MP, the industry’s highest pixel count. The new product uses the world-first pixel size of 0.8 μm.The new sensor uses the Quad Bayer color filter array, where adjacent 2x2 pixels come in the same color.

Intel publishes a 1-pager on its autonomous vehicle platform:"There are 12 cameras in a 360-degree configuration. Eight cameras support self-driving and four short-range cameras support near-field sensing for self-driving as well as self-parking.

Nikkei publishes an article on Panasonic 250m-range ToF solution, first presented 2 months ago."Panasonic Corp developed a range image sensor that can take an image of a 10cm object located 250m away in the dark.

Bloomberg reports about troubling signs at OPA-based LiDAR developer Quanergy that "has raised $160 million to date at a peak valuation of more than $1.5 billion.

The Phantom 4 Pro+ V2.0 is the latest version of DJI's hugely popular drone series aimed at enthusiasts. Equipped with a 1in sensor camera and an improved radio system, it's the best Phantom yet, but is it right for you? Adam finds out in his Phantom 4 Pro+ V2.

SeekingAlpha: Synaptics quarterly earnings call has interesting info on its optical under-display fingerprint sensor business:"...we really take a big scrub on all of our products in the ROI and what provides the best investment going forward. And as we did that analysis, it was becoming clear ...

Update: The correct translation coming from the company representation is posted here. The one below is based on Google automatic one and is not accurate.SmartSens Founder Xu Chen publishes an article on the company web site "Let China no longer miss the era of CIS.

Infineon demos its new ToF sensor for face recognition based on 14um pixels, the IRS238xC:

ResearchInChina releases "ADAS and Autonomous Driving Industry Chain Report 2018 (II)– Automotive Vision" report.

Archiv.org publishes a nice review paper from Reports on Progress in Physics "A trillion frames per second: the techniques and applications of light-in-flight photography" by Daniele Faccio (University of Glasgow, UK) and Andreas Velten (University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI).

Sony quarterly earning report does not bring surprises in image sensor business, everything goes as expected:Infineon reports a major automotive design win for its PMD-based ToF sensor:

The Canon SX740 HS is a pocket super-zoom with a 40x / 24-960mm range, 20 Megapixel sensor, 4k video, Wifi and Bluetooth. It's a mild refresh over the SX730 HS, but now employs the latest DIGIC 8 processor to supports 4k video and 10fps bursts. Here's my preview.

BusinessWire: Cepton, a developer 3D LiDAR based on stereo scanner, announces it will provide Koito with its miniaturized LiDAR solution for autonomous driving. The compact design of Cepton’s LiDAR sensors enables direct integration into a vehicle’s lighting system.

SeekingAlpha publishes TowerJazz Q2 2018 earnings call transcript with an update on its CIS technology progress:"We had announced the new 25 megapixel sensor using our state-of-the-art and record smallest 2.5 micron global shutter pixels with Gpixel, a leading industrial sensor provider in China.

SystemPlus Consulting publishes a reverse engineering report of Synaptics’ under-display fingerprint scanner found inside the VIVO X21 UD Smartphone:"This scanner uses optical fingerprint technology that allows integration under the display.

BusinessWire: SiOnyx announces the official launch for the SiOnyx Aurora action video camera with true day and night color imaging.

Andor publishes a video with some details of its new BSI sCMOS Sona sensor: 4.2MP, 32mm diagonal, up to 95% QE (was 82% in non-BSI version), vacuum sealed and cooled to -45deg:There is also a recording of webinar explaining the new camera features here.