Archives for April 2016

Sensing for Autonomous Driving

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Mobileye’s Co-founder, CTO, and Chairman, Amnon Shashua, talks about deep learning networks used to process sensor info in autonomous vehicle:



Meanwhile, SeekingAlpha presents a skeptical view on Mobileye's autonomous driving approach.

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Second Earthquake Affects Two Sony Fabs

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Reuters reports that Sony extends production halts on Saturday after a second 7.3 magnitude earthquake struck a key manufacturing hub in southern Japan. The image sensor plant in Kumamoto on the southern island of Kyushu had been already shut after an initial 6.5 magnitude quake rocked the region on Thursday.

Sony says that operations at its image sensor plant in Nagasaki, also in Kyushu, will be partially suspended too. Sony is assessing damage at the two plants and does not yet have a timeline for resuming operations.

"We are still checking for potential damage to the plants, which usually operate on a 24-hour basis," a Sony spokesman told Reuters. "We do not yet know how the closures will impact supply to customers like Apple."

Sony Nagasaki Technology Center (left) and
Kumamoto Technology Center (right)

Update: Another Reuters report quotes Sony spokesperson saying “We are not expecting any immediate supply disruption as we have some inventories right now. We will make an announcement promptly if any supply issues emerge.” He said the company was hoping to resume operations as soon as aftershocks end, and would probably provide an update on late Monday afternoon. "We are still checking for potential damage to the plants, which usually operate on a 24-hour basis," he said.

Apple could not be immediately reached for comment. Samsung says it has diversified its sources for image sensors used in its smartphones and the quakes will have no impact on its flagship products.

Update #2: Reuters: Sony on Sunday said production at its image sensor plant in Kumamoto, southern Japan, remained suspended as it assessed damage from a powerful earthquake. Operations at its image sensor plants in Nagasaki and Oita, also on the southern Japanese island of Kyushu, fully resumed, the company said. The Kumamoto plant has been offline since Friday, while operations at the Nagasaki and Oita plants were partially suspended on Saturday.

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Columbia University Presents Deformable Lens

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DPReview: Columbia University publishes its paper to be presented on IEEE International Conference on Computational Photography (ICCP), May 2016: "Towards Flexible Sheet Cameras: Deformable Lens Arrays with Intrinsic Optical Adaptation" by D.C. Sims, Y. Yue and S.K. Nayar. The accompanying Youtube video explains the idea:



Another Columbia University video presents its Cambits reconfigurable camera concept.

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Intel Adds RealSense Camera to its Compute Stick

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Liliputing reports that Intel demonstrates a prototype of its Compute Stick with a 3D RealSense Camera, as shown in Notebook Italia video - quite a lot of intelligence in a very small form factor:

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ITE Special Section on Advanced Image Sensor Technology

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Japan ITE Transactions on Media Technology and Applications Vol. 4(2016) No. 2 is devoted to a Special Section on Advanced Image Sensor Technology featuring 12 open-access papers from Sony, Canon, Renesas, several universities and more.

Canon paper "A Low Noise and High Sensitivity Image Sensor with Imaging and Phase-Difference Detection AF in All Pixels" by Masahiro Kobayashi, Michiko Johnson, Yoichi Wada, Hiromasa Tsuboi, Hideaki Takada, Kenji Togo, Takafumi Kishi, Hidekazu Takahashi, Takeshi Ichikawa, and Shunsuke Inoue shows QE trade-offs when implementing a dual-PD pixel:

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Sony Kumamoto Fab in Earthquake Area

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Bloomberg reports that Sony has evacuated employees from its southern Japan Kumamoto image sensor plant as a precaution after the 6.5-scale strong earthquake in the area, according to the company's spokeswoman Mami Imada. There are no reports of fire or injuries at the facility and the company will assess the extent of damage on facilities, she said.

Morningstar quotes
Sony spokesman saying that personnel at an image-sensor plant in Kumamoto prefecture were safe and there were no reports of serious damage, but the company was still assessing conditions.



Update: Bloomberg updates that the plant in Kumamoto on the southern island of Kyushu is still being inspected, Sony said. The strength of the earthquake, as well as persistent aftershocks, are raising the risk that it will take time to restore operations, Kenichi Saita, an analyst at Mizuho Securities, wrote in a report.

Still, he said he doesn’t expect the earthquake to have a major impact on camera-chip supplies, given current demand and Sony’s ability to shift production to other factories in Japan.

“We expect components for upcoming high-end smartphones to come from the Kumamoto factory, so there is concern on the impact on production and shipments,” Saita wrote.

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Caeleste, LFoundry, and Airbus to Develop CMOS Sensor for Space Applications

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BusinessWire: ESA has awarded and funded a contract to a European industrial consortium, led by Caeleste, with developing a new CMOS Sensor entirely designed, manufactured and tested within Europe. A High-Performance CMOS Sensor will be developed, aimed at demonstrating the capability to meet future ESA mission requirements (in terms of spectral sensitivity, SNR and environmental durability) for scientific space applications.

Caeleste, contributes to the project with over 250 man years of experience with the custom design and realization of CMOS sensors for various application domains, including space and astronomy applications.

LFoundry, with its wafer fab facility at Avezzano, Italy, is responsible for the manufacturing of the image sensor. LFoundry is able to manufacture sensors that respond to very stringent specifications such as cryogenic environment (at low temperatures - 180 degrees). Since 2006, the Avezzano site has been manufacturing imaging process technologies and products using technology nodes from 180nm down to 90nm technologies on 200mm wafers, including volume copper Back End of Line (BEOL), BSI processes and extensive testing capabilities.

Airbus Defence and Space will provide its 15 years’ experience in CMOS Sensors development for Space Applications and perform a characterization campaign in parallel to the one performed at Caeleste.

The collaboration with ESA makes us very proud,” declares Patrick Henckes, CEO at Caeleste “since we can play a strategic role in shaping the future of Europe’s space capability for image sensors, in accordance with the mission of ESA. Moreover, having LFoundry and Airbus Defence and Space as partners brings in their enormous expertise in this field and this will contribute considerably to the outcome and to the quality of the project.

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HTC 10 Smartphone Has Dual OIS

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HTC 10 smartphone has both 8MP front and 12MP rear cameras equipped with OIS, said to be the world's first. The rear camera is based on 1.55um UltraPixels, has F1.8 lens and DxO Mark score 88, same as Samsung Galaxy S7:

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More Single-Photon Imaging Papers

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IEEE JEDS publishes early open access papers "Photon Counting Error Rates in Single-Bit and Multi-Bit Quanta Image Sensors" by Eric Fossum and "Determining Conversion Gain and Read Noise using a Photon-Counting Histogram Method for Deep Sub-Electron Read Noise Image Sensors" by Dakota Starkey and Eric Fossum.

Few figures from the papers:

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Emmanuel Lubezki on Invisage QuantumCinema

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Invisage quotes a part of DPReview interview with Emmanuel Lubezki, who just received his third consecutive Oscar win for The Revenant this year:

DPR: You’ve worked with InVisage, the company behind QuantumFilm, and seem very enthusiastic about what that technology can do for filmmakers and photographers. Why?

EL: When InVisage approached me and showed me their sensor technology I got very, very excited. As people would say, it’s music to my ears. Actually, it’s music to my eyes what they are doing! What they’re attempting to do is everything I’ve been looking for, and that’s why I’m so excited to work with them.

The first thing I’m excited about is the high dynamic range of QuantumFilm, but the other thing that’s important is a camera that has a global shutter as opposed to a rolling shutter. That’s something that we suffered with a bit during Gravity. When you’re doing a lot of digital effects and stitching things together, not having global shutter can become a big issue, as you guys know.


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Lytro Cinema Camera Features 755MP , up to 300fps Sensor

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BusinessWire: Lytro introduces "Lytro Cinema, the world’s first Light Field solution for film and television."

Lytro Cinema defies traditional physics of on-set capture allowing filmmakers to capture shots that have been impossible up until now,” said Jon Karafin, Head of Light Field Video at Lytro. “Because of the rich data set and depth information, we’re able to virtualize creative camera controls, meaning that decisions that have traditionally been made on set, like focus position and depth of field, can now be made computationally. We’re on the cutting edge of what’s possible in film production.

With Lytro Cinema, every frame of a live action scene becomes a 3D model: every pixel has color and directional and depth properties. The camera features:
  • The highest resolution video sensor ever designed, 755 RAW megapixels at up to 300 FPS
  • Up to 16 stops of dynamic range and wide color gamut
  • Integrated high resolution active scanning
Lytro Cinema will be available for production in Q3 2016 to exclusive partners on a subscription basis.

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4T Pixel Noise Reduction in Photon Counting

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Rambus' and Dartmouth College's Michael Guidash, Jiaju Ma, Thomas Vogelsang and Jay Endsley publish an open access paper "Reduction of CMOS Image Sensor Read Noise to Enable Photon Counting" in Sensors Vol 14, #4 issue. The paper talks about CDS timing shortening and SF bias current optimization to minimize 1/f, RTS, and thermal noise:

CDS timing is given in ns

Update: Another pixel noise reduction paper in the same Sensors journal issue is "Noise Reduction Techniques and Scaling Effects towards Photon Counting CMOS Image Sensors" by Assim Boukhayma, Arnaud Peizerat, and Christian Enz from EPFL and CEA-Leti. It covers mostly theoretical foundations of the pixel noise reduction.

Thanks to AT for the link!

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TSMC & Xintec

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TSMC is to sell 5.1% ownership of Xintec. TSMC holds 10.2% of Xintec from its purchase of OmniVision's 49.1% ownership in VisEra Holding Cayman, Ltd. and 100% ownership in Taiwan OmniVision Investment Holding Co. Inc. (renamed as Chi Cherng Investment Co., Ltd.) on November 20, 2015. Of the above 10.2% Xintec ownership, 5.1% was sold on November 30, 2015. The remaining 5.1% announced to be sold now was released from the IPO lock-ups on March 30, 2016. After the Xintec shares sales, TSMC will remain as the largest shareholder of Xintec with approximately 41% ownership. TSMC announces that it has no plan to sell more Xintec shares in the foreseeable future.

TSMC expects to continue its close collaboration with Xintec in the areas of CMOS sensor, MEMS, and etc.

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Samsung CIS Slides

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Samsung Semi updated its last year's mobile products presentation talking about its recent CIS innovations and market shares:

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Sharp Expands its Distance Measuring Sensors Lineup

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Sharp updates its lineup of distance measuring sensors, now covering a range from 1.5cm to 5.5m:

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Image Sensor Precautions

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Sony publishes a 2016 edition of its Quality and Reliability Handbook. Its section 5.1 talks about precautions when dealing with image sensors:

  • Do not expose to ultraviolet rays, sunlight or other strong light for long periods. The transmittance and color characteristics of the on-chip lens and color filter may be affected.
  • Avoid storing or using products at a high temperature or high humidity, as this may adversely affect the transmittance or color characteristics.
  • The imaging characteristics may be affected by noise or other factors when strong electromagnetic waves or magnetic fields are approached during operation. Special care should be taken for CMOS image sensors as these are easily affected.
  • Note that the image of CMOS image sensors may be affected by light leaking to the optical black when using an infrared cut filter that has transmittance in the near infrared range while shooting subjects with high luminance.
  • Sony image sensor specifications do not assume use in environments with above-ordinary radiation levels.
  • White pixels occur spontaneously in image sensors over time and due to cosmic radiation. White pixels that occur should be compensated using a white pixel compensation circuit.

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Graphene Stretching Controls its Photoresponse

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Researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have demonstrated a new approach to modifying the light absorption and stretchability of atomically thin two-dimensional (2D) materials by surface topographic engineering using only mechanical strain.

"We achieved more than an order-of-magnitude enhancement of the optical extinction via the buckled 3D structure, which led to an approximately 400% enhancement in photoresponsivity,” stated Pilgyu Kang, a postdoctoral research associate and first author of the paper, “Crumpled Graphene Photodetector with Enhanced, Strain-tunable and Wavelength-selective Photoresponsivity,” appearing in the journal, Advanced Materials. “The new strain-tunable photoresponsivity resulted in a 100% modulation in photoresponsivity with a 200% applied strain. By integrating colloidal photonic crystal—a strain-tunable optomechanical filter—with the stretchable graphene photodetector, we also demonstrated a unique strain-tunable wavelength selectivity.

This work demonstrates a robust approach for stretchable and flexible graphene photodetector devices,” SungWoo Nam, an assistant professor of mechanical science and engineering added. “We are the first to report a stretchable photodetector with stretching capability to 200% of its original length and no limit on detection wavelength. Furthermore, our approach to enhancing photoabsorption by crumpled structures can be applied not only to graphene, but also to other emerging 2D materials.


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AR and VR Market Potential

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Statista quotes Goldman Sachs research predicting the industry reaching a value of $80 billion a year ($35 billion software and $45 billion hardware) by 2025, roughly the size of the desktop PC market today. The potential of AR/VR tech is extremely diverse:


Update: Re\code: AR startup Magic Leap publishes a patent on how AR will change a coffee drinking experience in the future.

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Lytro Exits Consumer Camera Business

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Imaging Resource, DPReview: Lytro exits consumer light-field camera business, apparently due to the lack of the consumer interest. The company CEO Jason Rosenthal says in his blog post "While consumer Light Field cameras offered a number of true technological breakthroughs such as interactive 3D pictures, radical lens specs, and the ability to focus a picture after the fact we had a number of disadvantages as well including 4X larger file sizes and lower resolution in comparison to other similarly priced cameras. The cold hard fact was that we were competing in an established industry where the product requirements had been firmly cemented in the minds of consumers by much larger more established companies. This issue was compounded by the fact that the consumer camera market was declining by almost 35% per year driven by the surge in smartphone photography and changing consumer tastes."

The company's Vimeo video talks about its new focus on Immerge VR cinema production platform:


Lytro Immerge from Lytro on Vimeo.

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ON Semi, Omnivision Unveil Security Camera Sensors

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ON Semi presents AR0237, a 1/2.7-Inch 2.1MP 1080p60 sensor for security and surveillance applications. The sensor uses DR-Pix technology with Dual Conversion Gain pixel and supports line interleaved T1/T2 readout with HDR processing in ISP chip, among other features:


PRNewswire: OmniVision announces OV9755 CameraChip HD image sensor for mainstream security, smart home, and IP cameras. The power-efficient sensor is based on 3.75um OmniPixel3-HS pixel. The 3.75um pixel is said to enable best-in-class low-light performance at 43Ke-/lux-sec and less than 0.2 lux SNR1 (the luminance value for a signal to noise ratio of 1:1). The OV9755 is currently in volume production.

"According to a recent industry report, the global smart camera market for security and surveillance applications is expected to grow from $1.93 billion today to $3.06 billion by 2020, with CMOS sensor-based cameras leading the growth," said Chris Yiu, senior marketing manager at OmniVision.

Other Omnivision announcements are design wins in Tamron camera module with OIS for security and action cameras, featuring 1/3-inch 4MP OV4689, and HiSilicon IP camera reference design with 1/3-inch 1080p30 OV2718.

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Unispectral Raises $7.5M

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Globes: Israeli startup Unispectral closed a $7.5M Series A funding round led by Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP), Robert Bosch Venture Capital (RBVC), Samsung Catalyst Fund and The Tel Aviv University Technology Innovation Momentum Fund. This brings the money raised by the company to date to $8M.

The company is developing the next generation of digital cameras which will use hyper-spectral sensors for enhanced seeing and sensing capabilities.

The company says it aims to transform the four-decade standard of color sensing mechanisms in compact cameras. Its imaging technology is said to provide an unprecedented low light sensitivity and rich color, complemented by better resolution. Unispectral's hyper-spectral sensor will be applicable to a wide range of use cases such as wearables, digital health and medical imaging, Internet of Things, industrial and agriculture applications, and beyond. This breakthrough technology, backed by multiple patents, is said to be able to distinguish material properties in solids, liquids and gases.

The company's PCT patent application WO2014207742 "A SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR COLOR IMAGE ACQUISITION" by David MENDLOVIC and Ariel RAZ reveals its technology:

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Huawei P9 Features Dual Camera

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The newly announced Huawei P9 flagship smartphone features a dual camera based on Sony 12MP IMX286 sensors with 1.25um pixel pitch:

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Ambarella S5 IP Camera SoC Delivers 4K 10-bit H.265 Video

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BusinessWire: Ambarella introduces the S5 SoC for 4K and multi-imager IP camera designs. The S5 offers 4K multi-exposure HDR fusion, 360° de-warp and ultra-low light processing. Maximum performance is 4Kp120 or 8Kp30 of H.264/AVC and 4Kp60 frames of H.265/HEVC, while supporting multi-streaming, rate control and transcoding functions. The S5 supports the high-quality Main10 HEVC Profile (10-bit H.265) and Ambarella’s SmartHEVC technology to reduce 4Kp30 video bitrates to between 512 Kbps and 4 Mbps. The S5 image sensor interface and its advanced 1-Gigapixel/s ISP can be configured as up to four independent sensor inputs to allow high resolution multi-imager cameras.

The S5 will play a critical role in the industry’s shift to 4K and H.265," said Fermi Wang, President and CEO of Ambarella. "With it, our partners gain a leading-edge image processor that delivers low power consumption, superior image quality, smart H.265 compression and a powerful quad-core CPU.

Ambarella low-power architecture combined with 14nm FinFET process enables 4Kp30 encoding, including DDR, at less than 1.4 Watts

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Omnivision Announces 2nd Generation RGB-IR Sensors

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PRNewswire: OmniVision announces the OV4686 and OV9756, two 1/3-inch RGB-Ir sensors that support dual band color filters instead of traditional mechanical rotary IR filters. Leveraging an innovative color array pattern, the OV4686 and OV9756 can capture high quality infrared images and video, even from long ranges, and bring superior color aliasing performance compared to previous generation offerings.

"Maintaining high quality images and color accuracy as lighting conditions change throughout the day is an essential capability for image sensors geared towards the security marketplace," said Chris Yiu, senior marketing manager at OmniVision. "By utilizing our second-generation RGB-Ir dual color band filter, the OV4686 and OV9756 sensors deliver excellent color performance and infrared imaging in a compact form factor well-suited for commercial and consumer applications such as smart doorbells and other IoT camera systems."

Built on a 2um OmniBSI-2 pixel, the OV4686 captures 1080p120 and 720p180 video. The OV9756 is based on 3.75um OmniPixel3-HS pixel and delivers 720p60 video. It also features low-power mode with system wake-up trigger functionality.

The OV4686 and OV9756 sensors are currently available for sampling and are expected to enter volume production in Q2 2016.


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IHS: iPhone SE Cameras Cost $13.30

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BusinessWire: IHS iPhone SE teardown report estimates both front and rear camera module cost $13.30, out of $156.20 total BOM, or about 8.5% - about the same proportion as iPhone 4s cameras:

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Fujifilm X70 review – X-series quality in your pocket!

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The Fujifilm X70 is a compact camera which couples the large APS-C / 16 Megapixel sensor of the XT1 and X100T with a fixed 28mm equivalent f2.8 lens. It's aimed at enthusiasts who want the quality of Fujifilm's interchangeable lens cameras but in an even smaller and lighter body than the X100T. To save space, weight and cost, there's no built-in viewfinder, but you can slot an optional rangefinder onto the hotshoe and the X70 becomes the first model in the X-series to feature a screen that not only tilts all the way up to face the subject for selfies, but with a touch-sensitive panel too. Find out if it's the compact you've been waiting for in my Fujifilm X70 review!

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iPhone SE Features Sony and Omnivision Sensors

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Chipworks reverse engineering reveals that Apple iPhone SE FaceTime front-facing camera uses Omnivision 1.2MP sensor with pixel pitch of 1.75 µm. The die, which features OV2E0BNN die markings, has a size of 4.3 mm x 4.1 mm (17.6 mm2):


The rear camera contains a Sony stacked (Exmor RS) sensor with a 6.02 mm x 4.83 mm (29.1 mm2) die size. The pixel pitch is 1.22 µm, as was used for the iPhone 6s/6s Plus. The decapsulated die photos from the SE and 6s Plus rear image sensors appear to be the same chip:

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