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PRNewswire, PRNewswire: La Palma, CA-based SeeDevice startup announces the general licensing availability of Photo Assisted Tunneling - Photo Detector (PAT-PD). The agreement allows partners to easily integrate SeeDevice's smart sensing technology into their products.

"PAT-PD uses quantum tunneling to rewrite a lot of the current specifications for light sensors. placing it in an entirely new category of photon sensing capability," said Hooman Dastghaib, CEO of SeeDevice.

PAT-PD is said to expand the CMOS sensors sensitivity beyond visible light all the way into SWIR (300nm-1,600nm band) with plans to expand to 2,000nm with their next-generation sensor, while maintaining low-light and near no-light sensing.

Additionally, the PAT-PD sensor increases photo-sensitivity to 106 A/W with SNR of over 60dB at room temperature. Response time is also reduced from microseconds to sub-nanoseconds while boosting DR to 100dB linear and 150dB non-linear.

SeeDevice achieves these results using standard CMOS fabrication process allowing for easy integration in mixed-signal process and avoiding expensive exotic materials and manufacturing processes to achieve similar results.

Current photo sensors work by directing incoming light to an array of PDs and photo-transistors that convert the light into an electric current which is amplified and then converted into viewable pixels using software. Image sensors using PDs are said to requir as much light as possible to generate a high-quality image so, unless pictures are taken in bright sunlight or perfect indoor lighting conditions, image quality degrades significantly in lower-light conditions. Sensitivity of PDs is said to be measured in uV per electron generated or amps/watt (A/W). While typical photo-diode sensors generate 0.15-0.25 A/W, PAT-PD uses quantum tunneling to produce an astounding 108 A/W, surpassing the performance of today's leading CMOS image sensors.

Quantum tunneling allows a photon-activated current flow to trigger using a fraction of the photons normally required in a photo-diode-based design. This allows the PAT-PD sensor to trigger with just a single photon, generating a current with unprecedented efficiency and creating a signal with significantly less input over a far wider range of wavelengths. Using a PAT-PD silicon-based CMOS image sensor, devices will be able to convey granular-level sharp details, even in extremely low light conditions, utilizing infrared, near infrared, and short-wave infrared frequencies.


According to Google, SeeDevice has filed for 8 patents so far, 5 of them are granted. The most recent out of published applications, the US20190237611, talks about strained silicon layers that expand the sensitivity into IR:

"Here, the wavelength expanding layer is formed including strained silicon and can split the energy levels of the conduction band and the valence band according to the direction of the crystal lattice planes of silicon.

Here, the light-receiving element can include a plurality of the wavelength expanding layers, which are different from each other in terms of at least one of their formation location and manufacturing process.

Here, the wavelength expanding layer can be formed by applying stress onto silicon and the interface of the oxide film.

Here, the wavelength expanding layer is formed including strained silicon and can split the energy levels of the conduction band and the valence band according to the direction of crystal lattice planes of silicon."

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University of Edinburgh and ST paper "A 128 × 128 SPAD Motion-Triggered Time of Flight Image Sensor with In-Pixel Histogram and Column-Parallel Vision Processor" by Francesco Mattioli Della Rocca, Hanning Mai, Sam Hutchings, Tarek Al Abbas, Kasper Buckbee, Andreas Tsiamis, Peter Lomax, Istvan Gyongy, Neale Dutton, and Robert Henderson presents sensor with combined vision and ToF functionality. The paper is also published in JSSC.

"A 128 x 128 SPAD motion detection-triggered time of flight (ToF) sensor is implemented in STMicroelectronics 40 nm CMOS SPAD foundry process. The sensor combines vision and ToF ranging functions to acquire depth frames only when inter-frame intensity changes are detected. The 40 μm x 20 μm pixel integrates two 16-bit time-gated counters to acquire ToF histograms and repurposes them to compare two vision frames without requirement for additional out-of-pixel frame memory resources. An embedded column-parallel ToF and vision processor performs on-chip vision frame comparison and binary frame output compression as well as controlling the time-resolved histogram sampling. The sensor achieves a maximum 32.5 kfps in vision modality and 500 fps in motion detection-triggered ToF over a measured 3.5 m distance with 1.5 cm accuracy. The vision function reduces the sensor power consumption by 70% over continuous ToF operation and allows the sensor to gate the ToF laser emitter to reduce the system power when no motion activity is observed."


"While most frame-comparison vision cameras require an out-of-pixel frame memory to store the previous frame, in this sensor the time-gated counters for ToF operation are repurposed in the vision modality to store consecutive intensity frames for processing by the embedded column-parallel processors."

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ST presents touchless button use case for its ToF sensors:

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US Department of Commerce released an amendment to the restrictions of selling chips to Huawei: "This amendment further restricts Huawei from obtaining foreign made chips developed or produced from U.S. software or technology to the same degree as comparable U.S. chips."

Reuters reports that "For chip suppliers across regions, the ban could also be a setback, as most use U.S. design software from Cadence Design Systems and Synopsys and chip-etching tools from firms that include Applied Materials, experts said.

In Asia, memory chipmakers — including Korea’s Samsung and SK Hynix, Japanese image sensor maker Sony, and Taiwanese chipset maker MediaTek — may be affected, a chip industry source said.

A Sony spokesperson declined to comment but pointed to the company’s comments earlier this month that it would cut its three-year sensor investment plan to adjust to the changing environment in the smartphone market."

FT quotes Jefferies Equity Research Managing Director Atul Goyal estimating that Huawei was Sony’s 2nd largest image sensor customer after Apple, accounting for about 20% of its image sensor operating profits and revenue. “Sony has already reduced image sensor output and . . . [is] already taking into account the Huawei impact in their forecast,” Goyal says.

In the long term, FT sources expect that Sony would be able to compensate some of the lost Huawei revenues by selling more to other Chinese smartphone companies, such as Vivo and Xiaomi.

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Smartsens video demos the company's auto-exposure performance during the startup:

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BusinessWire: ZTE announces the launch of Axon 20 5G smartphone in China on September 1, 2020. The device will be the world's first mass-produced 5G smartphone featuring under-display camera, marking a "milestone in ZTE's exploration of the true full display smartphone." The under-display camera is rumored to have 32MP resolution.

"All the major industry players have been working on the under-display camera smartphone. Consumers have also witnessed the evolution of smartphone display forms from notch display, water-drop notch display, pop-up selfie camera smartphone, to hole punch display.

By launching the world's first 5G smartphone with under-display camera, ZTE will further promote the development of display technologies in the smartphone industry, thereby bringing revolutionized experiences to all consumers."


TheElec reports that Samsung is re-evaluating its ToF camera strategy in smartphone applications. Samsung’s System LSI business is developing a dToF module, and Samsung might drop its current iToF from the future phones. The rumored Samsung's intention is to increase the range from the currebt 3m and match 6m ToF capability of Apple dToF LiDAR module.


ON Semi reported is Q2 2020 earnings. Most of the company business is affected by coronavirus:


Orsay Consulting publishes its map of companies involved in autonomous driving development. There are 44 companies in the LiDAR part of the map:

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InfiRay, formerly known as IRay, is probably the most advanced microbolometric sensor company in China. It has released 10um pixel-based imagers a year ago:


SystemPlus publishes a reverse engineering report of InfiRay 12um and 17um pixel generations (the pictures below are 17um generation):


InfiRay progress has been presented in the company's 2015 paper "Recent development of small pixel uncooled focal plane arrays at IRay" by P. Wang and H. Wang:

"The uncooled microbolometer makers have transitioned through smaller pitches about every six years while maintaining a noise equivalent temperature difference (NETD) of 20-50mK. IRay commercialized 25μm pixel pitch 640×512 and 384×288 uncooled infrared focal plane arrays (IRFPAs) and 20μm pixel pitch 640×512 and 384×288 IRFPAs in the past five years.

Vanadium oxide (VOx) microbolometers incorporated in these products are depicted in this paper. A 17μm pixel pitch 640×512 uncooled IRFPA with NETD of less than 35mK is also presented. The detectors are designed to enhance its manufacturability, life time, and its reliability under shock and vibration to meet security applications and Driver’s Viewer Enhancer (DVE) requirements."


A 2019 paper of Chinese Academy of Space Technology "Development of long-wavelength infrared detector and its space-based application requirements" by Junku Liu, Lin Xiao, Yang Liu, Longfei Cao, and Zhengkun Shen compares China-made microbolometric sensors with the foreign ones:

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Davide Scaramuzza updated his tutorial on event-based cameras from the earlier one. The new version has 113 slides and also a Powerpoint version with all videos and links included, resulting in 2.7 GB size.

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DigitalTrends, Wikipedia: Russell A. Kirsch recognized as the inventor of the pixel died from a form of Alzheimer’s disease at the adge of 91. He invented the pixel in 1957 when working at the National Bureau of Standards, now known as the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The first image was a digitally scanned photograph of his 3-month old son and had a resolution of 176 x 176 pixels:

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Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science & Technology, Korea, publishes MSc thesis "Fabrication of Ultra-Thin Photo-Multiplication Photodiode by Using a Non Fullerene-Based 2D Planar Small Molecular Semiconductor as an Efficient Optical Sensitizer" by Neethipathi Deepan Kumar.

"In this work, we explore the possibility of using nonfullerene and a planar n-type small molecular semiconductor, 2,2′‐((2Z,2′Z)‐((4,4,9,9‐tetrahexyl‐4,9‐dihydro‐s‐indaceno[1,2‐b:5,6‐b′]dithiophene‐2,7‐diyl)bis(methanylylidene))bis(3‐oxo‐2,3‐dihydro‐1H‐indene‐2,1‐diylidene))dimalononitrile (IDIC) as an optical sensitizer to improve the EQE and reduce the thickness of the photoactive layer to 70 nm. A key idea of this work is utilizing the unique photophysical properties of IDIC with an anisotropic electron transport. As is well known, contrary to spherical PCBMs (PC61BM and PC71BM) with an isotropic charge transport property, the 2D planar IDIC with an inherently anisotropic packing structure tends to hinder the formation of the effective electron percolation pathways. This is a very important requirement for the optical sensitizer of PM-OPDs because it leads to more efficient charge trapping. In addition, IDIC possesses a relatively higher absorption coefficient in the visible range compared to PC71BM, which can contribute to a higher photocurrent. Together with a deeper lowest unoccupied molecular orbital (LUMO) level of IDIC compared to PC71BM, all the mentioned photophysical properties of IDIC can be much more beneficial as optical sensitizers of the PMOPDs. Layer-by-layer deposition of P3HT as a photoactive layer and IDIC as an optical sensitizer enables more effective PM operation, yielding high EQE exceeding 130,000% and specific detectivity over 10^12 Jones at 150-nm-thick active layer. Furthermore, due to more facile spatial confinement of the charge carriers, the photoactive layer thickness was further decreased down to 70 nm while maintaining reasonably high EQE of 60,000% as well as specific detectivity over 1012 Jones. Physical origins of such synergetic effects of using IDIC as an optical sensitizer are fully discussed with various photophysical analyses in the forthcoming sections."

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Ouster 2018 article explains the design choices behind its 850nm SPAD-based LiDAR. Among other blocks, the article covers SPAD sensor and its data processing:

A Novel CMOS ASIC with SPAD Detectors

"CMOS SPADs have many practical advantages over the traditional approaches from other lidar manufacturers. Most important is that they can be directly integrated in a CMOS wafer, which makes it possible to incorporate massive amounts of signal processing on the silicon die right next to the detectors.

As lidar resolutions and data rates continue to increase, on-chip signal processing is essential - the current OS1-64 detector is capable of counting and storing over one trillion photons per second into on-chip memory. This is a titanic amount of data, and we’ve included over 100 GMACs per second (1 GMAC = 1 billion multiply accumulate operations) of signal processing logic in over 10 million transistors to ultimately produce the millions of 3D points per second that our customers use to drive cars, map environments, and identify obstacles.

Processing requirements are only going to go up, and Ouster is leading the way with our custom silicon.

SPADs are also moving along a Moore’s Law-esque performance curve. While today’s SPADs might be 2-5% efficient (efficiency here is measured as the percentage of photons that hit the detector that trigger a binary pulse. Most photons travel through the silicon without causing a pulse to trigger which is a bummer), new SPADs are 20-30% efficient (at 850nm) and efficiencies up to 80% may be possible as the technology matures. Increases in SPAD detector efficiency directly increase a sensor’s range and resolution - a 10x efficiency increase makes an OS1 with 640 lines of resolution not just possible but extremely likely. Unlike the legacy detector technologies used in lidar, our SPAD technology already achieves market leading performance but there is more than an order of magnitude improvement still left to go."

Operating in 850nm band requires more attention to sunlight radiation suppression. Ouster approaches this issue it by concentrating its VCSEL emitter light in sparse points and blocking sunlight from outside of these points, remotely similar to Apple iPad LiDAR:

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December 2020 issue of an International Journal on Sensing and Imaging publishes a paper "On Wide Dynamic Range Tone Mapping CMOS Image Sensor" by Waqas Mughal (University of Southampton, UK) and Bhaskar Choubey (Universität Siegen, Germany).

"The dynamic range of a natural scene often covers over 6 decades of intensity from bright to dark areas. Typical image sensors, however, have limited ability to capture this dynamic range available in nature. Even after designing specific wide dynamic range (WDR) image sensors, displaying them on conventional media with limited ability requires computationally complex tone mapping. This paper proposed a novel CMOS pixel which can capture and perform tone mapping during data acquisition. The pixel requires a reference voltage to generate tone mapped response. A number of different reference signals are proposed and generated which can perform WDR operation. Nevertheless, fixed pattern noise (FPN) effects the performance of these pixel. A pixel model with simple parameter extraction procedure is described for a typical tone mapping operator. This model is then used to obtain a simple procedure for pixel calibration leading to reduced FPN. The new proposed pixel response is able to capture upto 6 decades of light intensity and reported FPN correction procedure produces 1% of FPN contrast error."

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A Vimeo video "Night Vision R&D 1974 US Army; Research and Development Progress Report No. 53" shows how far the imaging has advanced over the last 45 years:



There is also a Youtube version of this video.

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A Vimeo video "Night Vision R&D 1974 US Army; Research and Development Progress Report No. 53" shows how far the imaging has advanced over the last 45 years:



There is also a Youtube version of this video.

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XDA Developers: Xiaomi announces its new flagship phone, Mi 10 Ultra. In its main camera, it uses "48MP, custom 1/1.32″ sensor (OV48C), 2.4µm pixels after pixel-binning." Most of the previous premium Xiaomi phones used Sony and Samsung sensors in the main camera.

DxOMark reports the highest score ever for the new smartphone:

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XDA Developers: Xiaomi announces its new flagship phone, Mi 10 Ultra. In its main camera, it uses "48MP, custom 1/1.32″ sensor (OV48C), 2.4µm pixels after pixel-binning." Most of the previous premium Xiaomi phones used Sony and Samsung sensors in the main camera.

DxOMark reports the highest score ever for the new smartphone:


Update: Omnivision officially confirms that Xiaomi uses its OV48C sensor in the top-scoring phone:

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cnTechPost, EqualOcean, NaijaTechNews, Observer Network, GizmoChina, Baidu: Huawei optoelectronics R&D center in Wihan employing 10,000 people develops automotive LiDAR, according to Wang Jun, president of the recently established Intelligent Automotive Solutions BU. The goal is to create a 100-line LIDAR in the short term.The future plans include cost reduction to $200 or even $100.

Xu Zhijun, Huawei's rotating chairman, says that Huawei will build LIDAR, millimeter-wave radar and other smart car core sensors to create a new sensor ecology.

With that massive investment, Huawei competes against about 130+ smaller LiDAR companies. When combined, these companies probably have the same 10,000 people employed, give or take. So, there is a competition of 10K-people-strong well organized army of Huawei designers against 130+ smaller teams scattered across the globe and exploring different ideas. It would be interesting to see who wins in the end.

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Mark Schubin publishes a lecture on TV history, including a review of some early image sensing devices:

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After initial misunderstanding with 15MeV and 12MeV statements in Axcelis announcements, I got an official clarification from the company:

Dear Vladimir,

I saw your recent article on our system and reference to energy range and I wanted to clear up any confusion. Our system does indeed have an energy range of 15 MeV. I just forgot to update the chart on slide 21 on our IR presentation when we posted earnings last week. That update to our website posting is in the process, thank you for noticing that. I’ve attached the press release on the product launch and the amended IR presentation for reference.

Sorry about the confusion, and thanks for providing such good coverage on the exciting image sensor market.

Best regards,

Maureen Hart
Director, Corporate Communications
Axcelis Technologies, Inc.

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Hamamatsu announces completion of construction of a new factory building at the Shingai Factory (Shingai-cho, Minami-ku, Hamamatsu City, Japan) to cope with the increasing sales demand for opto-semiconductors, X-ray image sensors and X-ray flat panel sensors. This new fab will start operations in October this year.

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Yokogawa brought AIST, Japan-originated Minimal Fab project to production. It uses 0.5-inch wafers and does not need a clean room to operate:








Minimal Fab process implements most of the steps needed for image sensor production, even a wafer thinning and bonding option. The most notable omission is a high energy ion implantation. So far, only lower than 50KeV implantation is supported. For a higher energy, one needs to process wafers at the large fab.


AIST presents Minimal Fab advantages:


There is a similar Futrfab work in the US promoting 2-inch wafer fab. However, its progress appears to be slow and it is far from being a market-ready solution for now.

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Lumotive announces Early Access Program (EAP) to accelerate adoption of its LiDAR technology. The EAP provides engineering support and early access to Lumotive's software-defined beam-steering technology to enable customized product design and rapid system integration.

“While our 3D-sensing products leverage innovative Liquid Crystal Metasurfaces (LCMs) to provide significant performance and cost advantages in several key markets, we know that customers want to accelerate time-to-market for their sensing systems with differentiated, application-specific features,” said Lumotive co-founder and CEO, William Colleran. “For companies developing LiDAR products targeting automotive, industrial and consumer markets, our EAP delivers acce