Visual Industry Guide
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DoresetEcho publishes an article about Emmy Awardee Peter Noble and his early works including the first TV image by 4096 MOS sensor 001:
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Oregon-based PreAct Technologies announces T30P flash LiDAR said to be the industry’s first software-definable LiDAR. Vehicles with software-defined architectures require sensor technology that can support over-the-air updates throughout the life of the vehicle, allowing OEMs to generate ongoing revenue by offering powerful new features and functionality.
“We are excited to bring our software-definable flash LiDAR to market, furthering the advancement of autonomous mobility across multiple industries,” said Paul Drysch, CEO of PreAct Technologies. “We’ve spent the last three years creating a solution that fulfills the need of software-defined vehicles, providing the most value for Tier 1s and OEMs over the long term by making any ADAS application relevant for the entire life of the vehicle.”
PreAct’s flash LiDAR architecture is based on modulated waveforms that can be optimized for different applications via over-the-air updates, along with an application stack that resides on the edge. The flexibility of a software defined LiDAR allows Tier 1 suppliers and OEMs to package one sensor for multiple use cases – everything from true curb detection and gesture recognition to self-parking and automatic door actuation – that can update to meet their changing needs as more user and sensor data become available.
“Near field automotive sensors have either been low-precision and low-cost, or high-precision and high-cost,” said Ian Riches, VP for the Global Automotive Practice at Strategy Analytics. “By bringing a high-precision, low-cost sensor to market, PreAct is enabling a huge range of safety and convenience features. The software-defined characteristics of the T30P will allow these features to improve during the lifetime of the vehicle, unlocking new revenue streams for automakers.”
T30P, with a frame rate of 200 fps and QVGA resolution, is also the fastest flash Lidar on the market making it well suited for ground and air robotics or industrial applications – systems which all share a need for fast, accurate and high-resolution sensors that can reliably define and track objects in all environmental conditions.
PreAct’s T30P Flash LiDAR sensor suite will be available in July 2022.
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Counterpoint forecasts:
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Sony publishes an interview with ist ToF application team members "Time-of-flight (ToF) image sensor for mobile phone applications revolutionizes mobile entertainment content with its capability to accurately capture not only figures and backgrounds, but also body gestures." Few quotes:
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Sigma publishes an official statement "Development status of the three-layer image sensor:"Image Sensors World Go to the original article...
KAIST and Samsung foundry publish a Nature paper "Mnemonic-opto-synaptic transistor for in-sensor vision system" by Joon-Kyu Han, Young-Woo Chung, Jaeho Sim, Ji-Man Yu, Geon-Beom Lee, Sang-Hyeon Kim, and Yang-Kyu Choi.
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Edinburgh University and ST publish an open access IEEE JSSC paper "A High-Throughput Photon Processing Technique for Range Extension of SPAD-based LiDAR Receivers" by Sarrah M. Patanwala, Istvan Gyongy, Hanning Mai, Andreas Aßmann, Neale A. W. Dutton, Bruce R. Rae, and Robert K. Henderson.
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Edinburgh University publishes "Direct Time-of-Flight Single-Photon Imaging" by Istvan Gyongy, Neale A. W. Dutton, and Robert K. Henderson, also published by IEEE TED.
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IIT Delhi publishes a lecture "From light waves to images: Advancing Science with Pictures" by Kedar Khare:Image Sensors World Go to the original article...
GlobeNewswire: Himax updates on its imaging business in 2021:
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It turns out that well before the Tower acquisition, in 90s, Intel already manufactured image sensors. Photobit designed it for Intel, Intel manufactured it, and then later Intel decided CMOS image sensors would be a commodity business and got out. Intel was Photobit’s first partner/customer. Intel Capital was an investor in Photobit for strategic purposes.
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Yole Developpement believes that ST and Sony could disrupt the technological landscape with their SWIR imagers:
"In 2021, the SWIR industry’s leading players were SCD, Sensors Unlimited, and Teledyne FLIR, sharing more than 50% of the 11,000 units shipped in the year. These leaders are subsidiaries of leading defense companies that started developing SWIR technology with the support of governments for strategic purposes. They constitute the legacy side of the SWIR industry.
On the other side, STMicroelectronics and Sony, two leaders in the consumer imaging industry started being active players in SWIR with new technologies including quantum dots. Their entrance might be explained by the growing demand from consumer OEM for new integration designs such as under-display 3D sensing in smartphones. If SWIR imagers reach a low price point, shipments could skyrocket to hundreds of millions within a few years. The SWIR industry could emulate the current 3D imaging industry, where STMicroelectronics and Sony share nearly 95% of the 225 million shipments (2020 data)."
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Peter Noble and Marvin White win 2021 Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards:
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Peter Noble and Marvin White win 2021 Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards:Image Sensors World Go to the original article...
Sony publishes videos from its "Sense the Wonder" Day:Image Sensors World Go to the original article...
BusinessWire: OMNIVISION announces a major pixel technology breakthrough―the world’s smallest 0.56-µm pixel with high QE, excellent quad phase detection (QPD) autofocus and low power consumption. This ultra-small pixel technology will address the demand for high-resolution and small pixel pitch image sensors for multi-camera mobile devices.
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BusinessWire: Intel and Tower Semiconductor announce a definitive agreement under which Intel will acquire Tower for approximately $5.4 billion.
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Shizuoka University publishes a IEEE Open JSSC paper "Hybrid Time-of-Flight Image Sensors for Middle-Range Outdoor Applications" by S. Kawahito, K. Yasutomi, and K. Mars.
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Vision Systems Design publishes a Youtube channel Vision Learning with quite a few interesting presentations. One of the recent presentations is 66min-long Teledyne e2v's "Understanding Image Sensor Performance - Interpret Key Parameters and Effective Comparison:"Image Sensors World Go to the original article...
Shenzhen, China-based startup company Adaps Photonics publishes an open-access IEEE paper "A 240 x 160 3D Stacked SPAD dToF Image Sensor with Rolling Shutter and In Pixel Histogram for Mobile Devices" by Chao Zhang, Ning Zhang, Zhijie Ma, Letian Wang, Yu Qin, Jieyang Jia, and Kai Zang.
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University of Zurich and ETH Zurich publish a paper "Event Guided Depth Sensing" by Manasi Muglikar, Diederik Paul Moeys, and Davide Scaramuzza.
"Active depth sensors like structured light, lidar, and time-of-flight systems sample the depth of the entire scene uniformly at a fixed scan rate. This leads to limited spatio-temporal resolution where redundant static information is over-sampled and precious motion information might be under-sampled. In this paper, we present an efficient bio-inspired event-camera-driven depth estimation algorithm. In our approach, we dynamically illuminate areas of interest densely, depending on the scene activity detected by the event camera, and sparsely illuminate areas in the field of view with no motion. The depth estimation is achieved by an event-based structured light system consisting of a laser point projector coupled with a second event-based sensor tuned to detect the reflection of the laser from the scene. We show the feasibility of our approach in a simulated autonomous driving scenario and real indoor sequences using our prototype. We show that, in natural scenes like autonomous driving and indoor environments, moving edges correspond to less than 10% of the scene on average. Thus our setup requires the sensor to scan only 10% of the scene, which could lead to almost 90% less power consumption by the illumination source. While we present the evaluation and proof-of-concept for an event-based structured-light system, the ideas presented here are applicable for a wide range of depth-sensing modalities like LIDAR, time-of-flight, and standard stereo. Video is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rvv9IQLYjCQ"
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Ibeo publishes a video on LiDAR performance in fog and ways to improve it:
TI video shows an importance of clean power supply for image sensors:
Trioptics publishes its active alignment system video:
ST publishes a video on choosing cover glass for its dToF proximity sensors (a longer version of this video is here):
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Yole Developpement's Q4 2021 Quarterly CIS Market Monitor updates on the market status:
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SeekingAlpha publishes a transcript of Onsemi Q4 2021 earnings report. Few quotes: