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Sony publishes few more details on Kumamoto fab damage assessment after April 14, 2016 and subsequent earthquakes:

"Operations at Sony Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation's Kumamoto Technology Center (located in Kikuchi Gun, Kumamoto Prefecture) were halted after the earthquakes and remain suspended. The extent of the damage caused by the earthquakes is being evaluated and preparations for the rehabilitation of the site are underway, with priority being placed on the safety of employees. Measures to minimize the impact on business operations are also under consideration.

The survey of damage to the Kumamoto Technology Center conducted so far has revealed damage to certain parts of the building, clean rooms and production equipment. The timeframe for resuming operations has yet to be determined. The Kumamoto Technology Center is the primary manufacturing site for image sensors for digital cameras and security cameras as well as for micro-display devices.

The impact of the earthquakes on Sony's consolidated results continues to be evaluated. The suspension of operations at the Kumamoto Technology Center may have an adverse impact on Sony's operating results, particularly in the Devices and Imaging Products & Solutions segments. In addition, the earthquakes have caused damage to the manufacturing facilities of certain third-party suppliers of components to Sony, the impact of which on Sony's business operations is currently being evaluated."

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Sony records an impairment charge in operating income of 59.6 billion yen related to long-lived assets in its camera module business.

Due to a decrease in projected future demand, Sony has revised its Mid-Range Plan for the camera module business in the Devices segment from the period beginning with the fiscal year ending March 31, 2017. Given the decrease in projected future demand, Sony performed an impairment analysis during the quarter ended March 31, 2016 and determined that future cash flows would not be sufficient to recover the entire carrying amount of the long-lived assets, leading to the recording of an impairment charge of 59.6 billion yen.

The earthquake of April 14, 2016 and subsequent earthquakes in the Kumamoto region have no impact on the consolidated financial results forecast for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2016. The impact on the consolidated financial results forecast for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2017 is currently being evaluated.

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Adimec demonstrated CCD camera and latest generation (Sony IMX250) CMOS based camera with and without color in low light.

On the left side of the company's Youtube video is the Adimec TMX7-DHD cameras (top is color and bottom is monochrome) using the Sony 2/3-inch ICX674 CCD image sensor with 4.54um pixel. On the right side is the Adimec TMX50 cameras (again top is color and bottom is monochrome) using the latest Sony 2/3-inch global shutter CMOS sensor IMX250 with 3.45um pixel. The TMX50 image is interpolated to match TMX7-DHD resolution of 1920x1080.

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Robert Stead, the founder of Sense Media organizing AutoSens conference, teams up with Patrick Denny of Valeo, Sven Fleck at SmartSurv, Benjamin May at AMX13, and a number of other professionals to submit IEEE Project Authorisation Request (PAR), Proposed Project 2020: Automotive System Image Quality.

From the submitted PAR:

5.2 Scope: This standard addresses the fundamental attributes that contribute to image and quality for automotive Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) applications, as well as identifying existing metrics and other useful information relating to these attributes. It defines a standardized suite of objective and subjective test methods for measuring automotive camera image quality attributes, and it specifies tools and test methods to facilitate standards-based communication and comparison among OEM and Tier 1 system integrators and component vendors regarding automotive ADAS image quality.

5.4 Purpose: This standard specifies methods and metrics for measuring and testing automotive image quality to ensure consistency and create cross-industry reference points.

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The mysterious $3.7b-valued AR startup Magic Leap publishes another Youtube video "A New Morning. Welcome to a new way to start your day. Shot directly through Magic Leap technology on April 8, 2016 without use of special effects or compositing:"

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Point Grey publishes a nice comparison of Sony and Aptina global shutter sensor, including the latest Sony 3.45um pixel size IMX250 and IMX265. One can see them compared with 5.86um pixel in Sony IMX174 and IMX249 and Aptina's 3.75um pixel in AR0134:

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Pixpolar publishes a whitepaper on low light imaging for security & surveillance:

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Intel publishes a Youtube video promoting its RealSense 3D cameras and REAL 2016 exhibition:

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Albert Theuwissen has updated the PDAF pixel report and included a figure-of-merit for PDAF. This FoM allows the reader to compare the efficiency of the PDAF pixels coming from different sensors, different technologies and different vendors. Also a couple of new references are added to list.

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ALA: Sofradir announces that its cost effective 3-4.8um MWIR Daphnis HD imager will enter production. The 10-micron pixel pitch high-definition IR detector claims superior performance against recently launched competitive 10µm products.

“Thanks to the sharp square like profile of its Mercury Cadmium Telluride photodiode and enlarged MW band, DAPHNIS offers improved recognition range versus any competing 10µm pitch products we have recently seen introduced in the market” says Laurent Fullana, general manager at Sofradir. “This elevates DAPHNIS to the product of choice for applications like gimbals, high-end vehicles sights and Infrared search and track systems. Moreover, the ability to obtain an HD image format from a detector whose size fits previous platform generations is a real benefit as it facilitates customer system upgrades.”

The new imager features:

• Higher resolution, 1280 x 720 pixels
• Longer range, achieves up to 55% DRI range improvement on the preceding generation of IR detectors
• Wider field of view, enables up to twice the field coverage of 15 micron pixel pitch MWIR detectors
• ROIC functionalities with digital output for easy integration
• Fully compatible with HD screen formats and visible or SWIR camera channels

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Daedal Research publishes "Global Dual Lens Smartphone Market: Trends & Opportunities (2016-2020)" research:

"For the span of next five years i.e. 2016-2020, projections are made that the market would rise tremendously at a significant CAGR. China is expected to lead the market accounting the significant share in the market.

The growth drivers for the global dual lens smartphone market are: expansion in fusion technology, production capacity expansion along with the rise in disposable income. Despite the market is governed by various growth drivers, there are certain challenges faced by the market such as: technological hurdles, stable sourcing of image sensor and migration to finer processes for image sensors, high-cost burdens, and algorithms."

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OSA Optics Express publishes ISAE-SUPAERO and CNRS joint paper "Integration of nanostructured planar diffractive lenses dedicated to near infrared detection for CMOS image sensors" by Thomas Lopez, Sébastien Massenot, Magali Estribeau, Pierre Magnan, Fabrice Pardo, and Jean-Luc Pelouard. The paper compares pixel Plasmonic Lens, Phase-Fresnel Lens, and metallic diffractive lens technologies for a monochromatic application at 1.064µm:


"The first is a Plasmonic Lens, based on the phase delay through nanoslits, which has been found to be hardly compatible with current CMOS technology and exhibits a notable metallic absorption. The second is a dielectric Phase-Fresnel Lens integrated at the top of a pixel, it exhibits an Optical Efficiency (OE) improved by a few percent and an angle of view of 50°. The third one is a metallic diffractive lens integrated inside a pixel, which shows a better OE and an angle of view of 24°."

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Sony says that operations at its Kumamoto Technology Center, which manufactures image sensors for digital cameras and security cameras, were halted after the earthquake on April 14, and currently remain suspended. Damage to the site's building and manufacturing lines is currently being evaluated, and with aftershocks continuing, the timeframe for resuming operations has yet to be determined.

Although some of the manufacturing equipment at Nagasaki Technology Center, which is Sony's main facility for smartphone image sensor production, and Oita Technology Center, former Toshiba fab which commenced operations as a wholly-owned facility of Sony on April 1, had been temporarily halted, the affected equipment has been sequentially restarted from April 17, and production has resumed. Sony Kagoshima Technology Center (located in Kirishima City, Kagoshima Prefecture) has continued its production operations after the earthquakes, and there have been no major effects on its operations.

Sony has confirmed the safety of all of its and its group companies' employees in the region affected by the earthquakes.

The impact of these events on Sony's consolidated results is currently being evaluated.

Digitimes publishes its speculations of the possible impact of the earthquake on the image sensor industry: "Because of Sony CIS solutions are highly customized, clients may have difficulties shifting orders to other suppliers in the short term. Switching orders to other suppliers will cause 2-3 month delays before they receive products.

With Apple's smartphone shipments expected to be impacted, Taiwan component suppliers that rely heavily on Apple's orders are also expected to see their performances influenced.

Sony's CIS shortage issue may benefit the second-largest CIS supplier worldwide, Samsung Electronics."

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Marketwired: Movidius announces a strategic collaboration with FLIR to bring advanced computer vision capabilities to Boson, FLIR’s latest LWIR camera core. FLIR integrates the Myriad 2 Vision Processing Unit (VPU) into its thermal core, Boson, creating what is called the most intelligent thermal imaging solution on the market today.

“FLIR has developed the first-ever integrated solution that now allows customers to take advantage of these new advancements while continuing to leverage FLIR’s unique thermal imaging technology and support ecosystem. FLIR will be instrumental in deploying advanced computer vision in applications such as home security, personal vision systems, drones, law enforcement and defense,” said Movidius CEO, Remi El-Ouazzane.

“We’re pleased to work with Movidius to deliver this amount of compute power into the size, weight and power requirements of the product you see today,” said Andy Teich, President and CEO of FLIR Systems. “With system-on-a-chip interfaces and machine intelligence capability available through Movidius, we enable FLIR cores to make greater sense of the rich information being captured by our sensors.”

Boson LWIR core features:

• Configurable VGA and QVGA thermal camera cores or sensor only with industry-leading SWaP
• 640 and 320 resolutions; 12 μm pixel pitch VOx microbolometer
• Multiple high­ performance FOV options; eight QVGA options and seven VGA options
• Multiple levels of sensitivity starting at 21 x 21 x 11 mm, 10­gram camera body
• Low power consumption, starting at 500 mW
• Rugged construction and highest temperature rating ­40°C to +80°C
• Integrated Myriad2 VPU for advanced image processing includes embedded algorithms for super resolution, noise filters, gain control, blending, and more
• Embedded video analytics bring high­end intelligence out of the box
• Software­ customizable functionality for video processing and power dissipation requirements
• Built­in support for physical and protocol­ level interface standards such as Ethernet, USB, SD card, LCD interfaces, and wireless video
• Inputs and processing for auxiliary sensors such as visible sensors for FLIR’s image blending and third­ party GPS and IMU sensors

Movidus Youtube video talks about the new product potential:

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Albert Theuwissen announces his 4th Harvest Imaging Forum "Durability of CMOS Technology and Circuitry outside the Imaging Core: integrity, variability and reliability" to be held in Dec. 2016. More info will be posted in the coming weeks.

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OSA Optics Express publishes Johns Hopkins University paper "Compact all-CMOS spatiotemporal compressive sensing video camera with pixel-wise coded exposure" by Jie Zhang, Tao Xiong, Trac Tran, Sang Chin, and Ralph Etienne-Cummings. The paper presents a prototype 127 × 90 pixels image sensor that can reconstruct 100 fps videos from coded images sampled at 5 fps. With 20× reduction in readout speed, the novel CMOS sensor only consumes 14μW to provide 100 fps videos.

"Figure 1 shows the difference between a conventional camera with global exposure and a PCE camera. In a conventional global exposure camera, all the pixels are exposed for a fixed amount of time (T v) to readout one image at readout frame rate of 1/T v. This is compared to a PCE camera, in which pixels are exposed through a random short “single-on” exposure of fixed duration (Te) within T v. The readout circuit only samples the pixel value at the end of T v with readout speed of 1/T v. PCE essentially compresses a spatiotemporal video into a single coded image. Upon on receiving the coded image, PCE reconstructs the entire video from the single coded image using sparse spatiotemporal reconstruction with an over-complete dictionary.

Since the reconstructed framerate is 1/(unit time o f Te), PCE provides a high frame rate using the same readout speed as a conventional image sensor. PCE is also different from traditional spatial CS approach, which recovers one frame using multiple random spatial samples. Thus, PCE is more optimal for video applications because the sparse samples include both spatial and temporal information."

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Mobileye’s Co-founder, CTO, and Chairman, Amnon Shashua, talks about deep learning networks used to process sensor info in autonomous vehicle:



Meanwhile, SeekingAlpha presents a skeptical view on Mobileye's autonomous driving approach.

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Reuters reports that Sony extends production halts on Saturday after a second 7.3 magnitude earthquake struck a key manufacturing hub in southern Japan. The image sensor plant in Kumamoto on the southern island of Kyushu had been already shut after an initial 6.5 magnitude quake rocked the region on Thursday.

Sony says that operations at its image sensor plant in Nagasaki, also in Kyushu, will be partially suspended too. Sony is assessing damage at the two plants and does not yet have a timeline for resuming operations.

"We are still checking for potential damage to the plants, which usually operate on a 24-hour basis," a Sony spokesman told Reuters. "We do not yet know how the closures will impact supply to customers like Apple."

Sony Nagasaki Technology Center (left) and Kumamoto Technology Center (right)

Update: Another Reuters report quotes Sony spokesperson saying “We are not expecting any immediate supply disruption as we have some inventories right now. We will make an announcement promptly if any supply issues emerge.” He said the company was hoping to resume operations as soon as aftershocks end, and would probably provide an update on late Monday afternoon. "We are still checking for potential damage to the plants, which usually operate on a 24-hour basis," he said.

Apple could not be immediately reached for comment. Samsung says it has diversified its sources for image sensors used in its smartphones and the quakes will have no impact on its flagship products.

Update #2: Reuters: Sony on Sunday said production at its image sensor plant in Kumamoto, southern Japan, remained suspended as it assessed damage from a powerful earthquake. Operations at its image sensor plants in Nagasaki and Oita, also on the southern Japanese island of Kyushu, fully resumed, the company said. The Kumamoto plant has been offline since Friday, while operations at the Nagasaki and Oita plants were partially suspended on Saturday.

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DPReview: Columbia University publishes its paper to be presented on IEEE International Conference on Computational Photography (ICCP), May 2016: "Towards Flexible Sheet Cameras: Deformable Lens Arrays with Intrinsic Optical Adaptation" by D.C. Sims, Y. Yue and S.K. Nayar. The accompanying Youtube video explains the idea:



Another Columbia University video presents its Cambits reconfigurable camera concept.

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Liliputing reports that Intel demonstrates a prototype of its Compute Stick with a 3D RealSense Camera, as shown in Notebook Italia video - quite a lot of intelligence in a very small form factor:

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Japan ITE Transactions on Media Technology and Applications Vol. 4(2016) No. 2 is devoted to a Special Section on Advanced Image Sensor Technology featuring 12 open-access papers from Sony, Canon, Renesas, several universities and more.

Canon paper "A Low Noise and High Sensitivity Image Sensor with Imaging and Phase-Difference Detection AF in All Pixels" by Masahiro Kobayashi, Michiko Johnson, Yoichi Wada, Hiromasa Tsuboi, Hideaki Takada, Kenji Togo, Takafumi Kishi, Hidekazu Takahashi, Takeshi Ichikawa, and Shunsuke Inoue shows QE trade-offs when implementing a dual-PD pixel:

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Bloomberg reports that Sony has evacuated employees from its southern Japan Kumamoto image sensor plant as a precaution after the 6.5-scale strong earthquake in the area, according to the company's spokeswoman Mami Imada. There are no reports of fire or injuries at the facility and the company will assess the extent of damage on facilities, she said.

Morningstar quotes Sony spokesman saying that personnel at an image-sensor plant in Kumamoto prefecture were safe and there were no reports of serious damage, but the company was still assessing conditions.



Update: Bloomberg updates that the plant in Kumamoto on the southern island of Kyushu is still being inspected, Sony said. The strength of the earthquake, as well as persistent aftershocks, are raising the risk that it will take time to restore operations, Kenichi Saita, an analyst at Mizuho Securities, wrote in a report.

Still, he said he doesn’t expect the earthquake to have a major impact on camera-chip supplies, given current demand and Sony’s ability to shift production to other factories in Japan.

“We expect components for upcoming high-end smartphones to come from the Kumamoto factory, so there is concern on the impact on production and shipments,” Saita wrote.

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BusinessWire: ESA has awarded and funded a contract to a European industrial consortium, led by Caeleste, with developing a new CMOS Sensor entirely designed, manufactured and tested within Europe. A High-Performance CMOS Sensor will be developed, aimed at demonstrating the capability to meet future ESA mission requirements (in terms of spectral sensitivity, SNR and environmental durability) for scientific space applications.

Caeleste, contributes to the project with over 250 man years of experience with the custom design and realization of CMOS sensors for various application domains, including space and astronomy applications.

LFoundry, with its wafer fab facility at Avezzano, Italy, is responsible for the manufacturing of the image sensor. LFoundry is able to manufacture sensors that respond to very stringent specifications such as cryogenic environment (at low temperatures - 180 degrees). Since 2006, the Avezzano site has been manufacturing imaging process technologies and products using technology nodes from 180nm down to 90nm technologies on 200mm wafers, including volume copper Back End of Line (BEOL), BSI processes and extensive testing capabilities.

Airbus Defence and Space will provide its 15 years’ experience in CMOS Sensors development for Space Applications and perform a characterization campaign in parallel to the one performed at Caeleste.

“The collaboration with ESA makes us very proud,” declares Patrick Henckes, CEO at Caeleste “since we can play a strategic role in shaping the future of Europe’s space capability for image sensors, in accordance with the mission of ESA. Moreover, having LFoundry and Airbus Defence and Space as partners brings in their enormous expertise in this field and this will contribute considerably to the outcome and to the quality of the project.”

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HTC 10 smartphone has both 8MP front and 12MP rear cameras equipped with OIS, said to be the world's first. The rear camera is based on 1.55um UltraPixels, has F1.8 lens and DxO Mark score 88, same as Samsung Galaxy S7:

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IEEE JEDS publishes early open access papers "Photon Counting Error Rates in Single-Bit and Multi-Bit Quanta Image Sensors" by Eric Fossum and "Determining Conversion Gain and Read Noise using a Photon-Counting Histogram Method for Deep Sub-Electron Read Noise Image Sensors" by Dakota Starkey and Eric Fossum.

Few figures from the papers:

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Invisage quotes a part of DPReview interview with Emmanuel Lubezki, who just received his third consecutive Oscar win for The Revenant this year:

DPR: You’ve worked with InVisage, the company behind QuantumFilm, and seem very enthusiastic about what that technology can do for filmmakers and photographers. Why?

EL: When InVisage approached me and showed me their sensor technology I got very, very excited. As people would say, it’s music to my ears. Actually, it’s music to my eyes what they are doing! What they’re attempting to do is everything I’ve been looking for, and that’s why I’m so excited to work with them.

The first thing I’m excited about is the high dynamic range of QuantumFilm, but the other thing that’s important is a camera that has a global shutter as opposed to a rolling shutter. That’s something that we suffered with a bit during Gravity. When you’re doing a lot of digital effects and stitching things together, not having global shutter can become a big issue, as you guys know.

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BusinessWire: Lytro introduces "Lytro Cinema, the world’s first Light Field solution for film and television."

“Lytro Cinema defies traditional physics of on-set capture allowing filmmakers to capture shots that have been impossible up until now,” said Jon Karafin, Head of Light Field Video at Lytro. “Because of the rich data set and depth information, we’re able to virtualize creative camera controls, meaning that decisions that have traditionally been made on set, like focus position and depth of field, can now be made computationally. We’re on the cutting edge of what’s possible in film production.”

With Lytro Cinema, every frame of a live action scene becomes a 3D model: every pixel has color and directional and depth properties. The camera features:

• The highest resolution video sensor ever designed, 755 RAW megapixels at up to 300 FPS
• Up to 16 stops of dynamic range and wide color gamut
• Integrated high resolution active scanning

Lytro Cinema will be available for production in Q3 2016 to exclusive partners on a subscription basis.

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Rambus' and Dartmouth College's Michael Guidash, Jiaju Ma, Thomas Vogelsang and Jay Endsley publish an open access paper "Reduction of CMOS Image Sensor Read Noise to Enable Photon Counting" in Sensors Vol 14, #4 issue. The paper talks about CDS timing shortening and SF bias current optimization to minimize 1/f, RTS, and thermal noise:

CDS timing is given in ns

Update: Another pixel noise reduction paper in the same Sensors journal issue is "Noise Reduction Techniques and Scaling Effects towards Photon Counting CMOS Image Sensors" by Assim Boukhayma, Arnaud Peizerat, and Christian Enz from EPFL and CEA-Leti. It covers mostly theoretical foundations of the pixel noise reduction.

Thanks to AT for the link!

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TSMC is to sell 5.1% ownership of Xintec. TSMC holds 10.2% of Xintec from its purchase of OmniVision's 49.1% ownership in VisEra Holding Cayman, Ltd. and 100% ownership in Taiwan OmniVision Investment Holding Co. Inc. (renamed as Chi Cherng Investment Co., Ltd.) on November 20, 2015. Of the above 10.2% Xintec ownership, 5.1% was sold on November 30, 2015. The remaining 5.1% announced to be sold now was released from the IPO lock-ups on March 30, 2016. After the Xintec shares sales, TSMC will remain as the largest shareholder of Xintec with approximately 41% ownership. TSMC announces that it has no plan to sell more Xintec shares in the foreseeable future.

TSMC expects to continue its close collaboration with Xintec in the areas of CMOS sensor, MEMS, and etc.

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