Archives for August 2021

Yole CIS Market Report: Smaller Companies Expand Market Share

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Yole Developpement publishes an update of its "Status of CMOS Image Sensor Industry 2021 report."  Pierre Cambou, Principal Analyst, reports interesting observations:

"For CIS players, 2020 did not play out similarly to 2019, in fact it was almost the opposite, with the smaller players doing best. Sony didn’t grow, but Samsung grew 13%, OmniVision, Smartsens and SK Hynix grew about 30%, while Galaxycore grew 52% YoY.

The CIS industry output stayed close to its structural limit all through the year, and especially in Q3-2020. For the full year, the whole industry grew by 7.3% YoY in revenue, in line with Yole’s expectation.

Until 2019 mobile device cameras were the main growth contributor to the CIS market. But in 2020 this is no longer the case. Computing, automotive and security market applications have now outpaced the growth of mobile device.
"

The US$20.7 billion CIS industry is still heavily dominated by mobile and consumer applications, representing more than 72% of revenues. Yet, despite all headwinds in 2020, computing, automotive and security have each grown to similar shares, reaching about 8% of CIS revenues, and 23% combined. They had represented 21% in 2019.

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New Videos: Nextchip, Optotune, Basler, ST

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Nextchip demos its ISP capabilities:


Also, Nexchip publishes the company introduction video:


Optotune presents is VCM-controlled mirrors that can be used for ToF and other raster-type imagers:


Basler presents its Pixel Beyond - a flexible binning technology based on FPGA interpolation:


ST shows gesture tracking use case for its ToF sensors:

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Tower Overviews Optical Fingerprint Technologies

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Amos Fenigstein, Managing Director of CIS R&D at Tower, publishes a nice review article "Image Sensors: Leaving Fingerprints Everywhere in the Age of Consumer Data Protection and Security." Few quotes:

There are two major “under screen” optical sensors technologies:
  • a lens-type sensor that uses a system lens and thus uses pixels the size of 5 to 6 microns to resolve the 50um features resolution in the fingerprint, 
  • a 1:1 sensor that does not use a lens and thus, requires large pixels, of around 50um.
The lens-type sensor, if used under LCD, requires an internal light source at the near Infrared regium as the LCD screen is not transparent to visible light. However, if used under OLED, the OLED screen itself acts as the light source and thus, the pixels are required to be sensitive to visible light. This is true for both lens-type sensors and 1:1 sensors under OLED screen (1:1 sensors are not being used under LCD).
The reason to use 1:1 sensors, although it is much larger than a lens-type and as a result are much more costly, is the minimum sensor height that can be achieved only with a lens-less sensor. Such small heights, as small as half a millimeter, is crucial for high end 5G smartphones, where there is only 0.6mm space between the battery on the back and the screen.

The text under the top row of pictures appears to be switched:

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Galaxycore Starts Public Stock Trading

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Tencent community news, Shanghai Securities News: Galaxycore stock has started trading at Shanghai Science and Technology Innovation Board. The company has raised 3.593 billion yuan ($555M), including about 30% of the strategic placement.
  • In terms of units, Galaxycore ranks first on the market, with a share of 29.7%; in the mobile phone sensors and 24.3% of the total market. 
  • The company has shipped 1.2 billion sensors in 2019.
  • From 2018 to 2020, the company's CMOS sensor sales grew from 887 million to 1.314 billion, and to 2.037 billion respectively ($137M,  $203M, $314M).
  • Galaxycore's sensor average selling price grew from 1.98 yuan/unit in 2018 to 2.43 yuan/unit in 2019 and to 2.88 yuan/unit in 2020.
  • The gross margin grew from 22.88% to 26.05% and to 28.48% in 2018-20, respectively. The company's three-year net profit was 500 million, 359 million and 773 million yuan respectively.

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Graphene Pixel Experiments

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Taiwan National Tsing Hua University publishes a paper "A Graphene/Polycrystalline Silicon Photodiode and Its Integration in a Photodiode–Oxide–Semiconductor Field Effect Transistor" by Yu-Yang Tsai, Chun-Yu Kuo, Bo-Chang Li, Po-Wen Chiu, and Klaus Y. J. Hsu.

"The present work reports the observation of the electrical and optoelectronic characteristics of a graphene/polycrystalline silicon junction and explores one possible usage of the junction. The current–voltage curve of the junction was measured to show the typical exponential behavior that can be seen in a forward biased diode, and the photovoltage of the junction showed a logarithmic dependence on light intensity. A new phototransistor named the “photodiode–oxide–semiconductor field effect transistor (PDOSFET)” was further proposed and verified in this work. In the PDOSFET, a graphene/polycrystalline silicon photodiode was directly merged on top of the gate oxide of a conventional metal–oxide–semiconductor field effect transistor (MOSFET). The magnitude of the channel current of this phototransistor showed a logarithmic dependence on the illumination level. It is shown in this work that the PDOSFET facilitates a better pixel design in a complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) image sensor, especially beneficial for high dynamic range (HDR) image detection."

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New ON Semi CEO Unveils His Two-Pillar Strategy

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ON Semi publishes its Financial Analyst Day presentation with few slides devoted to image sensors. The new CEO Hassane El-Khoury unveils the new strategy of growth based on Intelligent Sensing and Intelligent Power. The company gradually exits other non-core low-margin businesses.
There is also a Youtube video of the presentation.

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Himax Reports Multiple Design Wins for its Ultra Low Power Sensing Platform

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GlobeNewswire: Himax Q2 2021 earnings report updates on the company's low power vision solution design wins:

"Himax’s WiseEye total solution implements ultralow power computer vision AI that aims at endpoint devices with constraints in processor resource and power consumption. In addition to the design-win for a mainstream application from a leading tech name that it reported last quarter, the Company is pleased to report new awards during the second quarter from utility meter, battery camera and panoramic video conferencing applications. Some of these applications are expected to enter into mass production beginning the fourth quarter of 2021. Himax continues to work on various new solutions covering a wide variety of applications including door bell, surveillance, smart city, healthcare, agriculture and many other AIoT devices, with joint efforts from multiple algorithm partners in different domains, including Himax subsidiary Emza. Himax is at the forefront of delivering cutting-edge ultralow power smart image sensing solutions to the edge AI markets.

Hundreds of evaluation boards and developments kits have been purchased online and distributed to AI developers across the globe. With extended outreach to various AI channels, the Company has received priceless feedbacks from numerous users for different application domains that never occurred to it. Himax is excited about the business progress and is confident that WiseEye will play a key role in its non-driver segment looking ahead into 2022 and beyond."

From the company's factsheet:

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Smartsens Unveils 3MP Sensor for IoT Applications

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Smartsens announces SC301IoT sensor  implementing SFCPixel technology. It has 0.9e- RN and 0.3e- FPN with full-color night vision. The SC301IoT utilizes SmartSens’ PixGain technology to improve the FWC by 124% and DR by 5 dB compared to the previous generations of the product. It also supports up to 100dB Staggered HDR and reduces blooming to 15% (not sure what 15% means.)

The SC301IoT’s always-on feature includes fast wake-up as well as low power consumption. Tests find that the SC301IoT can go from powered off to fully functional within 60 ms due to SmartSens’ SmartAEC technology. Benefiting from low power consumption circuit design, the sensor requires merely 160mW under operating conditions and 650μW in standby mode.

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ON Semi Reports 28% YoY Image Sensor Sales Growth

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ON Semi publishes Q2 2021 report. Intelligent Sensing Group registers a nice 28% YoY growth. However, other groups' sales grew even more and image sensor proportion of the business dropped to 13%:


In a separate announcement, the company changes its name from ON Semiconductor to onsemi (lowercase letters) and presents its new logo and corporate identity:

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Tower Reports 30% YoY CIS Growth

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SeekingAlpha: Tower Q2 2021 earnings call transcript talks about a 30% YoY CIS sales increase in the last quarter:

"Our imaging business represented 15% of our revenues with main growing markets being the medical, dental x-ray, and industrial sensors. In addition, we continue to grow in the cinematography and broadcasting market segment being among our highest margin imaging applications.

For the medical market, we see a recovery of the dental segment to levels that are higher than the pre-COVID-19 levels with the present high growth trajectory. The main long-term growth drivers stem predominantly from the transition from traditional amorphous silicon-based flat panel technology to CMOS. Our customers who are either x-ray detectors suppliers or x-ray equipment suppliers, who design with us their own sensors, are gaining more market share and we, as sole supplier in most cases, are growing our share accordingly.

In the industrial market, we see a steep growth in all of its segments, machine vision for factory automation, for traffic control, as well as automatic data collection."

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Sony Reduces FY2021 Image Sensor Sales Forecast by 3%

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Sony reports its image sensor business quarterly results. The sales and profits grew YoY recovering from COVID impact. However, the company revises its FY2021 sales forecast by 3% downwards due to the lower mobile sensor sales and less favorable product mix:

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Nikon introduces the Golfer’s Laser Rangefinder COOLSHOT PROII STABILIZED

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Nikon introduces the Golfer’s Laser Rangefinder COOLSHOT 50i

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Nikon introduces the Golfer’s Laser Rangefinder COOLSHOT LITE STABILIZED

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IEEE TED Special Issue on Solid-State Image Sensors Extends Paper Submission Deadline

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The paper submission deadline for Special Issue of IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices on Solid-State Image Sensors is extended to September 30, 2021. The updated Call for Papers is published on IISS site and will be published soon on IEEE site too:

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Intel Realsense Management Shakeup

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Intel Corporate VP Sagi Ben Moshe responsible for Realsense is leaving the company, according to his LinkedIn message:

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MIPI Cleans Out Offensive Terminology

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MIPI BoD directed its working groups to replace the offensive terms in MIPI documents. While the primary examples were “master” and “slave,” the groups were also asked to identify any other problematic words, such as “blacklist” and ”whitelist” for example, and work to replace them till the end of 2022.

Although working groups can propose additional terms, the following replacements have been made available as options:
  • For master: active, central, controller, default, host, initiator, leader, main, manager, parent, primary, principal, requester, supervisor
  • For slave: auxiliary, child, client, completer, device, follower, peripheral, proxy, replica, responder, secondary, standby, subordinate, supporter, target, worker

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Imec Spin-Off Spectricity Raises €14M Series B Funding

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BusinessWire: An Imec spin-off Spectricity announces a €14M ($16M US) Series B funding round to accelerate the development and mass production of hyperspectral sensors and imagers for high-volume, low-cost applications from wearables to smartphones and IoT devices.

I am pleased to see Spectricity growing and closing their second financing round, three years after its creation as imec spin-off,” said Luc Van den hove, President and CEO of imec. “Spectricity’s products are based on unique imec technology, and we will continue to maintain a strong link between our R&D and Spectricity’s development to enable a lasting competitive edge for Spectricity’s products.

Following more than 10 years of research at imec, Spectricity was founded in 2018 by a team including research engineers of imec. CEO Vincent Mouret who joined the company last April and Chairman of the Board, Pieter Vorenkamp, ex-SVP of Broadcom, helped to productize the technology and scale the company.

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57 Slides about Sony Stacked Sensors

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Sony ISSCC 2021 Forum 5 presentation "Evolving Image Sensor Architecture through Stacking Devices" by Yusuke Oike is published on-line. A small subset is below:

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Sony Officially Warns about CIS Laser Damage

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Sony publishes an official warning of possibility of CIS damage from laser pointer and laser displays:

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Assorted Videos: Omnivision, Aeye, HK University

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Omnivision continues publishing a series of short interviews with its CEO Boyd Fowler:


It turns out that Aeye automotive LiDAR happens to have has a bullet tracking capability with no HW modifications needed. Not sure what is the use cas for that:


Yang Chai from Hong Kong University presents "Near-/in-sensor computing for neuromorphic machine vision."

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