Prophesee and Sony Develop a Stacked Event-Based Vision Sensor with the Industry’s Smallest Pixels and Highest HDR Performance

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Prophesee S.A. and Sony announce they have jointly developed a stacked Event-based vision sensor with the industry’s smallest 4.86μm pixel size and the industry’s highest 124dB (or more) HDR performance. This sensor combines of Sony’s stacked CMOS sensor process with Cu-Cu connections, with Prophesee’s Metavision Event-based vision technologies leading to fast pixel response, high temporal resolution and high throughput data readout. The newly developed sensor is suitable for various machine vision applications, such as detecting fast moving objects in a wide range of environments and conditions.

The 1/2-inch format sensor has 1280x720 resolution and uses 40nm logic process. The 124dB (or more) HDR performance is made possible by placing only BSI pixels and a part of N-type MOS transistor on the pixel chip (top), thereby allowing the aperture ratio to be enhanced by up to 77%. High sensitivity/low noise technologies Sony has developed over many years of CMOS image sensor development enable event detection in low-light conditions (40mlx).

By adding time information at 1μs precision to the pixel address where a change in luminance has occurred, event data readout with high time resolution is ensured. Furthermore, a high output event rate of 1.066Geps*5 has been achieved by efficiently compressing the event data, i.e. luminance change polarity, time, and x/y coordinate information for each event.