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International Business Strategies, Inc, forecasts image sensor market growth and partitioning (slide #16):


and says that image sensor fabs live long lives (slide 25):

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Digitimes Research believes that China will be acquiring many Western semiconductor companies, which Omnivision being one of them.

"Establishing world-class IDMs is one of China's potential policy goals under the 13th Five-Year Plan. To accomplish this, a mature IC industry supply chain will be required. Making acquisitions of foreign companies to complement the existing IC industry supply chain is one of the best ways. Acquiring foreign companies that have technological competitiveness would allow China's IC industry to improve its technology capability. Moreover, the establishment of a CNY120 billion national investment fund will assist China's local IC firms to make acquisitions overseas. Digitimes Research believes that China-based IC design houses would complete more mergers and acquisitions overseas during the 13th Five-Year Plan period."

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Sharp Challenge for Change Magazine publishes an article on its colorized NIR camera developed with National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST). The CCD-based camera uses IR LEDs to illuminate a night scene and somehow manages to reconstruct the color image:

"...because near infrared light has a completely different composition than visible light, these must be reconstructed as colors close to those that we can see. In other words, in the theory of capturing color at night, an object is irradiated with invisible near infrared rays—not the visible light we normally see. Light reflects back off the object and the colors of this light’s various wavelengths are analysed and subsequently reproduced as the colors we can see.

Although capturing color in the dark is based on sound theory, actually putting this theory into a working product presented Sharp with a number of challenges. But we knew that if such a product could be realized, then even objects existing in total darkness could be seen in color. Sharp thus proceeded to pool all of its resources into overcoming the obstacles."

"We had finally succeeded in developing technology for a single device capable of capturing color during both day and night. But realizing a totally new pixel structure would require highly advanced technology. Pooling the vast experience of our engineers with 40 years of experience and technology accumulated in the CCD development field, we embarked upon exhaustive trial-and-error testing that made use of our existing semiconductor manufacturing equipment. Our engineers were practically master craftsmen in the way they made fine adjustments to create the substrate. Most of the development period was taken up in reworking our existing semiconductor fabrication equipment so that it would carry out automated mass production of the new CCD."

The color night-vision camera won the Digital Imaging Award in the CEATEC JAPAN 2014, Innovation Awards “As Selected by U.S. Journalists” and the Japan Brand Award in the 2014 10 Best New Product Awards, sponsored by the Nikkan Kogyo Shimbun, Ltd.

NIR image as seen by regular camera

Same image reproduced by Sharp color night camera

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CMOSIS opens a subsidiary CMOSIS America LLC in Raleigh, NC, established in January 2015. Bruce Bradford serves as Director of Business Development managing U.S. operations and to grow CMOSIS' business and customer base in the Americas. “With the establishment of CMOSIS America LLC we have committed a substantial investment in our local presence in the U.S. to better support our existing American customer base and pursue new business opportunities,” said Lou Hermans, COO of CMOSIS.

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Intel keeps investing in more and more RealSense promotional videos:

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PhoneDog Youtube channel evaluates Intel RealSense rear camera inside Dell Venue 8 7000 tablet. The 3D camera measurements are proved to be fairly accurate:



Tom's Hardware RealSense accuracy tests has shown more mixed results with some measurements being significantly off:


Update: Intel posts a video promoting the RealSense measurement feature:

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Sony patent application US20150029374 "Image sensor, manufacturing apparatus and method, and imaging apparatus" by Yoshiaki Kitano proposes a back-illuminated sensor where at least some of SF, SEL and RST and even TG transistors are placed in a layer grown on top of the photodiode - possibly a local epi, although Sony does not use this word. The transistors are FinFET-like, sort of. Since FinFETs have almost no bulk, the SF gain should be much closer to unity and its effective gate cap should be minimal. The PD area can be expanded to almost whole pixel area:


Update: While we are at Sony news many times this week, WSJ quotes Masahiro Ono, an analyst at Morgan Stanley MUFG Securities, saying "Sony’s image sensors are the best in the world and are at least four years ahead of their competitors." If Sony manages to release this FinFET pixel into production, I would agree with that 4 years ahead claim.

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ON Semiconductor reports Q4 2014 results showing that image sensor products now constitute 19% of the company revenues. ON Semi CFO, Bernard Gutmann, says: "Revenue for our Image Sensor Group was approximately $166 million, as compared to approximately $104 million in the third quarter. The increase of approximately $62 million was driven primarily by inclusion of Aptina for the full quarter."


Other notable quotes from the earnings call:

"Integration of Truesense is effectively complete, and integration of Aptina Imaging is progressing well. For the fourth quarter, Aptina was nicely accretive to our non-GAAP net income, which excludes the impact of such items as costs related to restructuring, fair market value step up of inventory, amortization of intangibles, and other special items. We remain on track to deliver projected financial results provided at the time of announcement of our acquisition of Aptina."

"Based on our experience with the business during last few months, I am very confident of archiving the profitability targets for Aptina. In fact, I am pleased to report that financial performance of Aptina so far has significantly exceeded our expectations. Aptina should enable us to drive growth in the industrial and automotive market in a significant manner. The strategic value of Aptina was further reinforced by extremely positive reaction from many of our customers, especially in the automotive and industrial end-markets."

"Demand from action sports camera customers was stronger than expected during the quarter for our image sensor solutions. We continued to see increasing adoption of 13 megapixel image sensor solutions for mainstream consumer mobile designs. There was also a strong push for Fast Focus and OIS solutions at 13 megapixel and higher."

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Sony quarterly earnings presentation reports strong image sensor sales, revises upwards the yearly sales forecast:


The updated semiconductor business fact sheet from Feb 4, 2015 shows a steady progress of image sensor sales:

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Norwegian poLight AS has raised NOK 146m (~$19M) in a private placement for the next steps towards commercialization of poLight’s autofocus actuators for mobile phone cameras and represents a next step in the announced plan for an IPO. poLight planned to raise NOK 90-120 million in this round of financing. The over subscription enables the company to further accelerate its growth.

“poLight is on track for commercialization of its unique technology and is committed to the ambition of taking a leading role in the market for auto focus lenses used in mobile cameras”, says Øyvind Isaksen, CEO of poLight. poLight works with several potential customers and is in the process of establishing manufacturing capacity in a cooperation with ST Micro as a manufacturing partner. Volume production is planned to start in 2H of 2015.

poLight has a patented Tunable Optical Lens with many performance benefits compared to VCMs, and it is said to score far better in terms of instant focus and low power consumption. Combined with advanced image processing the poLight lens will create new mobile applications such as: Instant Focus enabling to bring the image in focus instantaneously; All in Focus which will allow the user to have all objects in-focus, from close to far; and full resolution Focus after the fact, which enables the user to refocus the picture long after taking it without losing image quality.

TLens Principle

1st ST Wafer with poLight AF

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PR Newswire: Korea-based eWBM Ltd. announces DR1151 SoC that calculates the relative distance to the object with a single-lens Dual Aperture camera. Dual Aperture's 4-color 3D imaging solution extracts RGB and IR signals by single image sensor. eWBM SoC is said to operate at more than 30fps speed with low power.

"As DR1151 has attracted a lot of interest from related companies before it was released, it will be available to customers at home and abroad from the end of February, when the test is completed. We also expect that a full-fledged sales of DR1151 will be carried out from the second half of this year when the applications has been developed," Wookon Koh, the head of marketing for eWBM, said.

DR1151 can be used for various applications such as 3D gesture recognition, gaming, distance-sensitive CCTV, automative collision avoidance systems, contactless fingerprint, single-lends laparoscope and etc. It also can be used to improve functionality of the smart phone camera-high-precision autofocusing macro, focus changes after imaging, 3D background removal and etc. eWBM has attracted an investment of $8,000,000 from Value Invest Korea last year for the commercialization of its next generation imaging technology.

"DR1151 will lead very significant changes in the camera sensor market. It will be the first year for eWBM to become the de facto representative of SoC fabless companies through a successful fab-out of DR1151," said Stephen Sang-geun Oh, CEO of eWBM.

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IMEC officially announces a line of hyperspectral imagers in a mosaic layout with per-pixel on 4x4 and 5x5 ‘Bayer-like’ arrays deposited onto a 2MP 5.5µm pixel CMOSIS CMV2000 sensor:


A full lineup of IMEC hyperspectral offerings now includes both linescan and array imagers:


Also, JB kindly pointed me to a 40-pages presentation on its hyperspectral imaging technologies and projects (HSI). Few slides from the presentation:

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Avnet publishes Vimeo video demoing Aptina HDR sensors:

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Imec publishes its hyperspectral imager flyer. The new imager is based on CMOSIS 2MP image sensor and features 16 or 25 spectral bands per pixel:

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A Youtube video talks about 36-band multispectral imagers developed by students at University of Granada, Spain:

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Nature piblishes an open-access Samsung paper "Organic-on-silicon complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor colour image sensors" by Seon-Jeong Lim, Dong-Seok Leem, Kyung-Bae Park, Kyu-Sik Kim, Sangchul Sul, Kyoungwon Na, Gae Hwang Lee, Chul-Joon Heo, Kwang-Hee Lee, Xavier Bulliard, Ryu-Ichi Satoh, Tadao Yagi, Takkyun Ro, Dongmo Im, Jungkyu Jung, Myungwon Lee, Tae-Yon Lee, Moon Gyu Han, Yong Wan Jin, and Sangyoon Lee. The company proposes superposing an organic photodiode (OPD) onto a CMOS circuit with Si photodiodes, which is said to double the light-input surface area of each pixel:

A G OPD is placed on top of the B and R color filters. The G OPD detects the amount of G light, after which the underlying Si PDs selectively detect the amounts of B and R light through the B and R color filters, respectively.

Samsung publishes properties of its green OPD layer:


The dark current is fairly independent of temperature:


The paper concludes with a picture from 5MP Organic-on-Si imager:

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Business Wire: Sony increases its production capacity for stacked CMOS sensors in the fiscal year ending March 31, 2016 ("FY15"). Sony Semiconductor also plans to reorganize and optimize its production sites as it accelerates the shifting of resources to the image sensor business.

This investment is intended primarily to augment production facilities used in the mastering and layering processes for stacked CMOS image sensors, specifically at Sony Semiconductor's Nagasaki Technology Center ("Nagasaki TEC"), Yamagata Technology Center ("Yamagata TEC"), and Kumamoto Technology Center ("Kumamoto TEC"). The mastering process refers to the manufacture of photodiodes and wiring processes for stacked CMOS image sensors. The layering process refers to the layering of semiconductor chips containing back-illuminated structure pixels on top of semiconductor chips containing the circuit for signal processing.

With this investment, Sony plans to increase total production capacity for image sensors from its current level of approximately 60,000 300mm-equivalent wafers per month to approximately 80,000 300mm wafers per month by the end of June 2016. Previously, as a mid to long range target, Sony had aimed to raise its total production capacity for image sensors to approximately 75,000 wafers per month. To facilitate this increased production, Sony has continued to augment production facilities at each site, and it established Yamagata TEC in March 2014. Through this investment, Sony will exceed its previous target ahead of schedule.

The total investment amount is projected to be approximately 105 billion yen, comprising approximately 78 billion yen of investments in Nagasaki TEC, approximately 10 billion yen of investments in Yamagata TEC and approximately 17 billion yen of investments in Kumamoto TEC.

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Sony patent application US20150021461 "Image sensor and electronic device" by Toshiyuki Nishihara and Hirofumi Sumi proposes a buried channel TG and binary detector to reduce influence of TG surface traps in very low light image sensors:

"since a pixel signal is extremely weak when weak light is detected, it is desirable to reflect electrons generated from photoelectric conversion on intensity of the pixel signal while losing as few electrons as possible. In general, however, when electrons generated in a photodiode are transferred to a floating diffusion, carriers (electrons) are doped at an interface level generated due to a defect present on a gate oxide film interface (interface defect) of a transfer transistor."

"there is provided an image sensor including pixels each configured to include a transfer transistor configured as an embedded channel type MOS transistor and to output a pixel signal based on a charge transferred to a floating diffusion from a photodiode by the transfer transistor in an on state, and a determination unit configured to convert the output pixel signal to a digital value, then compare the converted digital value to a threshold value, and thereby make a binary determination on presence or absence of incidence of a photon on the pixel that has generated the pixel signal. Accordingly, the image sensor that makes a binary determination on presence or absence of incidence of a photon on a pixel exhibits the effect of reducing influence of an interface state on the transfer transistor."

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Rambus introduces an interesting IP block, the On-chip Noise Monitor, potentially useful for debugging the on-chip noise problems. The monitor is available in TSMC 40G/LP and GF28HPP/SLP processes and have a noise resolution on 200uV/LSB in bandwidth up to 3-6GHz. LabStation software enables fully automated measurements, post-processing, and data visualization, including noise spectrum:


A short Youtube video demos the system:

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Barron's: Rosenblatt Securities‘s analyst Brian Blair forecasts:

"We believe the most critical trend for OmniVision’s business this year is what we are calling the selfie trend. The basic idea is that front facing cameras on smartphones have generally been VGA – 1MP over the last 5 years. We believe that this is shifting in 2015 to 5MP — 13MP sensors for front-facing cameras. We expect to initially see this at the high end of the market, but we anticipate the trend will quickly filter into mid-tier models as well. We recently saw evidence of this trend at CES with a few models that had 5MP – 13MP front facing cameras (from Samsung and HTC notably) and we expect MWC in early March to showcase numerous additional models. This trend is critical, as it meaningfully lifts dollar content per handset and raises overall ASPs/ revenues, and provides a bump to gross margins as well."

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Intel publishes more info on its F200 structured light front camera.

RealSense F200 camera

The IR Laser Projector emits a structured pattern of Class 1 infrared light used to determine the dimensional characteristics of objects by the depth camera:

Laser projected structured light patterns are quite unusual

Intel explains that the right (green) pattern is, in fact, changing at fast speed, so that if one makes a picture of it at 1/30s exposure, it blurs into the left (gray) pattern. EETimes says that the projector emits 16 different patterns.

A Youtube video talks about the camera capabilities:

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ON Semiconductor publishes a series of short videos showing its image sensor solutions:

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Yole Developpment releases an update to its CMOS sensor report with the new market data:

"Driven by mobile and automotive applications, the CIS industry is expected to grow at a CAGR of 10.6% from 2014 - 2020, reaching a market value of US$16.2B by 2020."

"Automotive is the big story this year, as car manufacturers like Tesla, Nissan and Ford are showing off their first camera-enabled features. Market traction is particularly impressive, with most CIS players enjoying growth rates of 30% - 50%. But this is only the beginning, with most CIS players looking at this market, total revenue should reach US$800M in 2020 – for CIS sensors only. Automotive’s emerging importance promises profound implications for the CIS ecosystem. As CIS moves from a “for display” application towards a “for sensing” application, new players such as processor and software providers will become key partners for sensor design and marketing."

"Since 2010, Yole Développment has well documented the rise of back side illumination (BSI), which has now become a mainstream technology that’s captured more than 50% of CIS production... Size constraints in mobile have pushed 3D stacking BSI, which currently has 20% of the market."

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Samsung has held Innovation Days on Jan. 19-21, 2015 in Dresden, Germany. The event was envisioned to be the "focal point for the purchase of innovative technologies in Europe." The list of the technologies that Samsung interested in is dominated by imaging items:

New technologies & innovations for wearable devices:

• New user scenarios
• Next generation User Experience (UX)
• Low power components

New technology for camera products:

• Auto focus / MEMS actuator
• Optical image stabilisation
• Active Lens technology
• Actuators
• High efficiency IR sensing image sensor

New material technology:

• Transparent barrier / film
• NIM (Nano Insulation Material) Organic
• Heating surface
• Material transmitting IR rays
• Sapphire coating
• 5 axis CNC
• Technology for waterproofing / water repelling

MEMS Sensors:

• Touch Sensor, Dust or particle, Fingerprint, Force, Reed, GSR Sensors
• Ambient light / RGB Sensor
• Gesture: Optical proximity sensor / 3D time of flight -TOF
• Inertial Sensors: Accelerometers, Gyroscopes, Pressure sensor, Humidity sensor & Magnetometer
• Vital Sign Sensors (for healthcare devices): non-contact, non-invasive, motion cancelling, low power

Sensors:

• Fibre detection (cloth)
• Thermopile Sensors: Non-contact temperature sensing
• ToF = Time of Flight (measuring distance / length): non-contact distance measuring sensor
• PIR / TIR Bolometer (IR) Sensor
• Pressure
• Temperature / humidity
• Ultrasound sensor
• Flex Sensor
• Radon sensor
• Non contact sleep detection sensor

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Grand View Research report "Image Sensors Market Analysis By Technology (CCD, CMOS, CIS), By Application (Automotive, Consumer Electronics, Defense & Aerospace, Industrial, Medical, Surveillance) And Segment Forecasts To 2020" dated by Aug. 2014 shows that CCD market share shrunk to 14.5% in 2012:

CIS is Contact Image Sensor here

The global market was valued at $8,450M in 2012, and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 4.6% from 2014 to 2020.

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ST 32x32 SPAD array developed under EU funded FP6 project Megaframe with University of Edinburgh and partners is the basis of Heriot-Watt University 20 billion fps-fast camera. The open access Nature Communications' paper "Single-photon sensitive light-in-fight imaging" by Genevieve Gariepy, Nikola Krstajić, Robert Henderson, Chunyong Li, Robert Thomson, Gerald Buller, Barmak Heshmat, Ramesh Raskar, Jonathan Leach & Daniele Faccio.

A laser pulse is reflecting off multiple mirrors, passing three times across the field of view of the SPAD camera (35 35 cm2). The same laser is used to create a trigger sent to the camera. The SPAD camera collects scattered photons from the laser pulse. The field of view does not contain the mirrors because the scattered light coming from the mirror surfaces is much more intense than the Rayleigh-scattered light during propagation.

The histogram indicates the time of arrival of the laser pulse as measured by pixel (22, 21). The time frames, shown at 0, 1, 2, 3 and 4 ns, show the evolution of the pulse in time as it propagates across the scene. The integration of all frames gives the total path followed by the light, similarly to what can be acquired by an EMCCD camera at maximum gain for an exposure time of 7 s.

A Youtube video shows the light propagation process:



New Scientist too publishes an article on the new camera.

Thanks to LG for the link!

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2nd International Symposium on Microoptical Imaging and Projection (MIPS 2015) id to be held on March 24-26, 2015 in Jena, Germany. The symposium's call for papers mentions many invited speakers on image sensor technology:

• Bernd Buxbaum, pmdtechnologies gmbh
• Jacques Duparré, Pelican Imaging Corp.
• Tigran Galstian, Université Laval
• Flavien Hirigoyen, ST Microelectronics SA
• Ryoichi Horisaki, Osaka University
• Bernard Kress, Google [X] Labs
• Christian Perwaß, Raytrix GmbH
• Markus Rossi. Heptagon
• Sabine Süßtrunk, EPFL, IC-IVRG

Thanks to AT for the link!

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The paper on camera-based random number generator has been published half a year ago. Now the same group of researches from University of Geneve, Switzerland publishes their deck of slides "Quantum random number generation on a mobile phone" by Bruno Sanguinetti, Anthony Martin, Hugo Zbinden, and Nicolas Gisin.


And here is Youtube video of the presentation:

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Teledyne DALSA announces Rad-icon 3030 CMOS X-Ray sensor featuring 3096 x 3100 pixel resolution, an active area of 30.6 x 30.7 cm, and 99um pixel size. The sensor delivers real-time frame rates of up to 30 fps, a very high frame rate for such a huge area sensor weighting 9KG with package:

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SeekingAlpha: Rambus CEO Ron Black talks about lensless image sensor project status: "Coming up in early March in Barcelona Spain is the Mobile World Congress or MWC, which is the premier wireless conference. If you recall last year at the conference, we launched our Lensless Smart Sensor, the smallest, lowest power, lowest cost image sensor on the planet and won a Best of Show from Tom's Hardware, something that frankly surprised us and that we're exceedingly proud of.

Last year's show sparked enormous interest, especially with press from prominent outlets such as the MIT Technology Review and Gizmondo, and we work inundated with interest from all segments of the industry from medical to automotive, to industrial, to consumer.

Many of the parties requested us to provide a platform for the industry at large and especially the maker community in which to innovate. At the risk of leaking too much, we will be launching such a platform at this year's MWC and hope to generate even more interest and more importantly some commercial relationships for the Lensless Smart Sensor this year and next."

Later, he says that Rambus is considering "various monetization options for our Binary Pixel and Lensless Smart Sensor solutions."

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