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KU Leuven

PhD on temporal noise reduction in CMOS image sensors     Geel, Belgium     Link

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From Nikkei Asia news: https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Tech/Semiconductors/Japan-s-Toppan-shifts-image-sensor-component-production-to-China

Japan's Toppan shifts image sensor component production to China

TOKYO -- Japan's Toppan Holdings has moved production of components for CMOS image sensors from Japan to China, aiming to boost local production 40% as Beijing looks to bolster its supply chains for related technologies.

CMOS -- complementary metal-oxide semiconductor -- sensors convert light captured by camera lenses into electrical signals. Among CMOS components, Toppan produces on-chip color filters (OCF) that colorize captured images and microlenses that increase light-gathering power. Without OCF, CMOS can only detect differences in light level.

Toppan brought related equipment from its plant in Japan's Kumamoto prefecture to a facility in Shanghai and increased production lines from five to seven. They do not fall under U.S. export restrictions targeting China for advanced chipmaking equipment.

The Kumamoto plant will be used for research and development and its approximately 370 employees will be maintained.

The global CMOS market in 2022 was around $21.2 billion, according to French research firm Yole Intelligence. Sony Group leads with a 42% market share, followed by Samsung Electronics with 19% and U.S.-based Omnivision with 11%.

China's presence among top companies is limited to seventh-place GalaxyCore with 4% and eighth-place SmartSens with 2%. While Sony and Samsung manufacture OCF in-house, Chinese manufacturers mainly procure from outside sources.
In China, demand is increasing for CMOS related to automobiles, smartphones, surveillance cameras and other fields. Toppan will strengthen sales to local CMOS sensor manufacturers by producing near areas of demand.

Toppan's move comes as Beijing is spending more than $1.75 billion a year on subsidies to boost domestic semiconductor production, according to the South China Morning Post.
The U.S. has placed restrictions on the export of chipmaking equipment to China out of concerns the technology could be diverted for military purposes, making it difficult for the country to produce advanced chips.

Among chips in practical use, the most advanced level is currently said to be 3 nanometers. In general, the smaller the nanometer level for a logic chip, the more powerful it is.

Amid U.S. restrictions, China is focusing on CMOS, which differ from logic chips in manufacturing method and the definition of advanced products. Most CMOS can be manufactured using mature technology of 28 nm or greater, with the production equipment falling outside of the U.S. restrictions.
China's share based on production capacity of all 28-nm or greater so-called legacy chips is expected to reach 33% of the world's total in 2027, up 4 percentage points from 2023, according to Taiwan research firm TrendForce.

Beijing announced its "Made in China 2025" high-tech industry development plan in 2015, choosing semiconductors as a priority area. Two large government funds have been set up so far to help boost the domestic chip industry.

Plans for a third phase have recently emerged. Bloomberg reported this month that China was raising more than $27 billion from local governments and state-owned enterprises for a chip fund, the biggest of its kind.

Investment in mature technology other than CMOS is also increasing in China, and Japanese and U.S. manufacturing equipment makers are increasing sales in this field as well.
    
The value of chipmaking equipment shipments to China reached a record high of over $30 billion in 2023, up 6% from 2022 and putting the country first ahead of Taiwan and South Korea in imports, according to industry group SEMI.

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In a preprint titled "Metasurface-based planar microlenses for SPAD pixels", J. Vaillant et al. of STMicroelectronics and CEA LETI write:

In this paper we present two design generations of metasurface-based planar microlenses implemented on Front-Side Illumination SPAD pixels. This kind of microlens is an alternative to conventional reflow microlens. It offers more degrees of freedom in term of design, especially the capability to design off-axis microlens to gather light around the SPAD photodiode. The two generations of microlenses have been fabricated on STMicroelectronics SPAD and characterized. We validated the sensitivity improvement offered by extended metasurface-based microlens. We also confirmed the impact of lithography capability on metasurface performances, highlighting the need have access to advance deep-UV lithography.

 

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Sony Semiconductor Solutions Europe

Senior Top AMS Verification Engineer     Trento, Italy     Link

Senior Digital Physical Implementation Engineer      Trento, Italy     Link

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A paper titled "SPAD Image Sensors for Quantum and Classical Imaging" by Prof. Edoardo Charbon was published in the STO Meetings proceedings in January 2024.

Paper link: https://www.sto.nato.int/publications/STO%20Meeting%20Proceedings/STO-MP-IST-SET-198/MP-IST-SET-198-C1-03.pdf

Abstract:
Single-photon avalanche diodes (SPADs) have been demonstrated on a variety of CMOS technologies since the early 2000s. While initially inferior to their counterparts implemented dedicated technologies, modern CMOS SPADs have recently matched them in sensitivity, noise, and timing jitter. Indeed, high time resolution, enabled by low jitter, has helped demonstrate the most impressive developments in fields of imaging and detection, including fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy (FLIM), Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET), fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (FCS), time-of-flight positron emission tomography (TOF-PET), and light detection and ranging (LiDAR), just to name a few. The SPAD’s power of detecting single photons in pixels that can be replicated in great numbers, typically in the millions, is currently having a major impact in computational imaging and quantum imaging. These two emerging
disciplines stand to take advantage of larger and larger SPAD image sensors with increasingly low jitter and noise, and high sensitivity. Finally, due to the computational power required at pixel level, power consumption must be reduced; we thus advocate the use of in situ computational engines, which, thanks of CMOS’ economy of scale and 3D-stacking, enable vast computation density. Some examples of this trend are given, along with a general perspective on SPAD image sensors. 

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Sony recently released a new 247MP rolling shutter CIS available in monochrome and color variants: IMX811-AAMR and IMX811-AAQR.

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Here are few new videos from image sensor companies.

Two about new hardware built around image sensors:

• Trinamix-ST under-OLED face recognition camera

• Prophesee AR glassses demo
  

One about new facilities:

• An official opening of TSMC-Sony plant in Kumamoto where Sony will manufacture its new image sensors:

And one about a new sensor series:

• Omnivision presents its new generation of automotive HDR sensors:

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Euresys

Sales Manager - Europe            Liège, Belgium or Schongau, Germany           Link

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Euresys

Sales Manager - Europe            Liège, Belgium or Schongau, Germany           Link

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From Nikon newsroom: https://www.nikon.com/company/news/2024/0307_01.html

Nikon to Acquire US Cinema Camera Manufacturer RED.com, LLC

March 7, 2024

TOKYO - Nikon Corporation (Nikon) hereby announces its entry into an agreement to acquire 100% of the outstanding membership interests of RED.com, LLC (RED) whereby RED will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Nikon, pursuant to a Membership Interest Purchase Agreement with Mr. James Jannard, its founder, and Mr. Jarred Land, its current President, subject to the satisfaction of certain closing conditions thereunder.

Since its establishment in 2005, RED has been at the forefront of digital cinema cameras, introducing industry-defining products such as the original RED ONE 4K to the cutting-edge V-RAPTOR [X] with its proprietary RAW compression technology. RED's contributions to the film industry have not only earned it an Academy Award but have also made it the camera of choice for numerous Hollywood productions, celebrated by directors and cinematographers worldwide for its commitment to innovation and image quality optimized for the highest levels of filmmaking and video production.

This agreement was reached as a result of the mutual desires of Nikon and RED to meet the customers’ needs and offer exceptional user experiences that exceed expectations, merging the strengths of both companies. Nikon's expertise in product development, exceptional reliability, and know-how in image processing, as well as optical technology and user interface along with RED’s knowledge in cinema cameras, including unique image compression technology and color science, will enable the development of distinctive products in the professional digital cinema camera market.

Nikon will leverage this acquisition to expand the fast-growing professional digital cinema camera market, building on both companies' business foundations and networks, promising an exciting future of product development that will continue to push the boundaries of what is possible in film and video production.

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Photonis has released new videos describing the latest improvements in its image intensifiers.  

A little background might be useful to those with little exposure to image intensifiers.

First, Photonis itself. Those of you who are interested in the whole complex story can find it here. The original Photonis was a renamed spinoff of Philips that subsequently acquired a few other companies including Burle, the renamed spinoff of RCA's vacuum tube operation. Recently, the Photonis Group renamed itself Exosens but still uses Photonis as the brand for its image intensifiers.

Image intensifiers are vacuum tubes that have at one end a surface that emits electrons on receipt of photons, some sort of acceleration and electron multiplication mechanism and a phosphor at the other end to produce a brighter visible image. As new developments have been applied to intensifiers, various generations have been assigned.

Gen 0 - See this (somewhat irreverent) link. (Not real, of course.) Sometimes the first low-gain tubes are called Gen 0.

Gen 1 - Light hitting an alkali photocathode produces electrons that are accelerated and electrostatically focused by a metal cone on to a curved phosphor. These invert the image, which is reverted by the optics - 1930s - 1960s.

Gen 2 - Proximity-focused electrons from the photocathode hit a microchannel plate in which they are multiplied. The electron output is proximity-focused on a flat phosphor. Some of these still have the focusing cone to provide image inversion. 1970s

Gen 3 - The alkali photocathode is replaced by a cesium-coated gallium arsenide membrane. 1970s-1990s

Gen 4 - Photocathode improvements of various types and, typically, electronic gating. Strictly speaking, these are still Gen 3. 2000s+

The videos showing tubes Photonis characterizes as Gen 4+:

1 - Demonstration of electronic gating

2 - Demonstration of performance

3 - Demonstration of halo improvements

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Call for Papers: IEEE International Conference on Computational Photography (ICCP) 2024
https://iccp-conference.org/iccp2024/call-for-papers/
Submission Deadline: March 22, 2024 @ 23:59 CET

ICCP is an international venue for disseminating and discussing new scholarly work in computational photography, novel imaging, sensors and optics techniques. This year, ICCP will take place in EPFL, Lausanne Switzerland, on July 22-24th!

As in previous years, ICCP is coordinating with the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI) for a special issue on Computational Photography to be published after the conference.

 ICCP 2024 seeks novel and high-quality submissions in all areas of computational photography, including, but not limited to:

•  High-performance imaging.
•  Computational cameras, illumination, and displays.
•  Advanced image and video processing.
•  Integration of imaging, physics, and machine learning.
•  Organizing and exploiting photo / video collections.
•  Structured light and time-of-flight imaging.
•  Appearance, shape, and illumination capture.
•  Computational optics (wavefront coding, digital holography, compressive sensing, etc.).
•  Sensor and illumination hardware.
•  Imaging models and limits
•  Physics-based rendering, neural rendering, and differentiable rendering.
•  Applications: imaging on mobile platforms, scientific imaging, medicine and biology, user interfaces, AR/VR systems.

Learn more on the ICCP 2024 website, and submit your latest advancements by Friday, 22nd March, 2024.

The call for posters and demo will be published soon with a deadline end of April. It will also be a great opportunity to advertise your work.

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Prophesee and Qualcomm recently showcased their "blur free" mobile photography technology at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Press release: https://prophesee-1.reportablenews.com/pr/prophesee-s-metavision-image-deblur-solution-for-smartphones-is-now-production-ready-seamlessly-optimized-for-the-snapdragon-8-gen-3-mobile-platform

February 27, 2024 – Paris, France - Prophesee SA, inventor of the most advanced neuromorphic vision systems, today announced that the progress achieved through its collaboration with Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. has now reached production stage. A live demo during Mobile World Congress Barcelona is showcasing Prophesee’s native compatibility with premium Snapdragon® mobile platforms, bringing the speed, efficiency, and quality of neuromorphic-enabled vision to cameras in mobile devices.

Prophesee’s event-based Metavision sensors and AI, optimized for use with Snapdragon platforms now brings motion blur cancellation and overall image quality to unprecedented levels, especially in the most challenging scenarios faced by conventional frame-based RGB sensors, fast-moving and low-light scenes.

“We have made significant progress since we announced this collaboration in February 2023, achieving the technical milestones that demonstrate the impressive impact on image quality our event-based technology has in mobile devices containing Snapdragon mobile platforms. As a result, our Metavision Deblur solution has now reached production readiness,” said Luca Verre, CEO and co-founder of Prophesee. “We look forward to unleashing the next generation of Smartphone's photography and video with Prophesee's Metavision.”

“Qualcomm Technologies is thrilled to continue our strong collaboration with Prophesee, joining efforts to efficiently optimize Prophesee’s event-based Metavision technology for use with our flagship Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 Mobile Platform. This will deliver significant enhancements to image quality and bring new features enabled by event cameras’ shutter-free capability to devices powered by Snapdragon mobile platforms,” said Judd Heape, VP of Product Management at Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.

How it works
Prophesee’s breakthrough sensors add a new sensing dimension to mobile photography. They change the paradigm in traditional image capture by focusing only on changes in a scene, pixel by pixel, continuously, at extreme speeds.

Each pixel in the Metavision sensor embeds a logic core, enabling it to act as a neuron.
They each activate themselves intelligently and asynchronously depending on the amount of photons they sense. A pixel activating itself is called an event. In essence, events are driven by the scene’s dynamics, not an arbitrary clock anymore, so the acquisition speed always matches the actual scene dynamics.

High-performance event-based deblurring is achieved by synchronizing a frame-based and Prophesee’s event-based sensor. The system then fills the gaps between and inside the frames with microsecond events to algorithmically extract pure motion information and repair motion blur.
Learn more: https://www.prophesee.ai/event-based-vision-mobile/

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A recent preprint on ArXiv https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.12516 titled presents a new CMOS image sensor designed to achieve sub-electron read noise and photon number resolving capability.

Skipper-in-CMOS: Non-Destructive Readout with Sub-Electron Noise Performance for Pixel Detectors

Abstract: The Skipper-in-CMOS image sensor integrates the non-destructive readout capability of Skipper Charge Coupled Devices (Skipper-CCDs) with the high conversion gain of a pinned photodiode in a CMOS imaging process, while taking advantage of in-pixel signal processing. This allows both single photon counting as well as high frame rate readout through highly parallel processing. The first results obtained from a 15 x 15 um^2 pixel cell of a Skipper-in-CMOS sensor fabricated in Tower Semiconductor's commercial 180 nm CMOS Image Sensor process are presented. Measurements confirm the expected reduction of the readout noise with the number of samples down to deep sub-electron noise of 0.15rms e-, demonstrating the charge transfer operation from the pinned photodiode and the single photon counting operation when the sensor is exposed to light. The article also discusses new testing strategies employed for its operation and characterization.

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From TechRadar: https://www.techradar.com/phones/samsung-galaxy-phones/there-is-no-such-thing-as-a-real-picture-samsung-defends-ai-photo-editing-on-galaxy-s24

"There is no such thing as a real picture": Samsung defends AI photo editing on Galaxy S24

Like most technology conferences in recent months, Samsung’s latest Galaxy Unpacked event was dominated by conversations surrounding AI. From two-way call translation to gesture-based search, the Samsung Galaxy S24 launched with several AI-powered tricks up its sleeve – but one particular feature is already raising eyebrows.

Set to debut on the Galaxy S24 and its siblings, Generative Edit will allow users to artificially erase, recompose and remaster parts of an image in a bid to achieve photographic perfection. This isn’t a new concept, and any edits made using this generative AI tech will result in a watermark and metadata changes. But the seamlessness with which the Galaxy S24 enables such edits has understandably left some Unpacked-goers concerned.

Samsung, however, is confident that its new Generative Edit feature is ethical, desirable and even necessary in today’s misinformation-filled world. In a revealing interview with TechRadar, Samsung’s Head of Customer Experience, Patrick Chomet, defended the company’s position on AI and its implications.

“There was a very nice video by Marques Brownlee last year on the moon picture,” Chomet told us. “Everyone was like, ‘Is it fake? Is it not fake?’ There was a debate around what constitutes a real picture. And actually, there is no such thing as a real picture. As soon as you have sensors to capture something, you reproduce [what you’re seeing], and it doesn’t mean anything. There is no real picture. [...] You can try to define a real picture by saying, ‘I took that picture’, but if you used AI to optimize the zoom, the autofocus, the scene – is it real? Or is it all filters? There is no real picture, full stop.”
“But still, questions around authenticity are very important,” Chomet continued, “and we [Samsung] go about this by recognizing two consumer needs; two different customer intentions. Neither of them are new, but generative AI will accelerate one of them.

“One intention is wanting to capture the moment – wanting to take a picture that’s as accurate and complete as possible. To do that, we use a lot of AI filtering, modification and optimization to erase shadows, reflections and so on. But we are true to the user's intention, which was to capture that moment.

“Then there is another intention, which is wanting to make something. When people go on Instagram, they add a bunch of funky black and white stuff – they create a new reality. Their intention isn’t to recreate reality, it’s to make something new. So [Generative Edit] isn’t a totally new idea. Generative AI tools will accelerate that intention exponentially in the next few years [...] so there is a big customer need to distinguish between the real and the new. That’s why our Generative Edit feature adds a watermark and edits the metadata, and we’re working with regulatory bodies to ensure people understand the difference.”

On the subject of AI regulation, Chomet said that Samsung "is very aligned with European regulations on AI," noting that governments are right to express early concerns around the potential implications of widespread AI use.

"The industry needs to be responsible and it needs to be regulated," added Chomet, noting that Samsung is actively working on that. "Our new technology is amazing and powerful – but like anything, it can be used in good and bad ways. So, it’s appropriate to think deeply about the bad ways.”

As for how Generative Edit will end up being used on Samsung's new Galaxy phones, only time will tell. Perhaps the feature will simply help average smartphone users (i.e. those unfamiliar with Photoshop) get the photos they really want, rather than facilitate mass photo fakery. Indeed, it still remains to be seen whether generative AI tech as a whole will be a benefit or a hindrance to society as we know it.

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