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GlobeNewsWire: In line with its new focus on computer vision applications, Himax announces the UltraSenseIR HM1062 HD sensor delivering 44% NIR QE for a wide range of eye-safe, computer vision applications for compact devices such as front facing cameras for smartphones, notebooks, wearable devices, drones and other embedded devices. The company does not specify the wavelength at which the high QE has been measured.

“Excellent NIR sensitivity with low noise performance is critical for high quality image data acquisition and allows computer vision systems to process and analyze the image data more effectively, and even capture data that would have been undetectable with a lower sensitivity sensor,” said Amit Mittra, CTO of Himax Imaging. “In an active light system, laser diodes are commonly used to project patterns that are superimposed on to the scene and decoded by the computer vision algorithms. The Himax UltraSenseIR™ NIR sensitivity allows for the reduction of the laser output power which can substantially improve the eye safety of the device.”

“Our growing UltraSenseIR™ product line has received positive feedback from our partners due to advancements in system performance and also opportunities to reduce system cost, power and mechanical dimensions,” said Jordan Wu, CEO of Himax Technologies. “As many industries and applications place more sensing elements and intelligence into smaller devices, the HM1062 compact 1/6.5-inch optical format, small package size and low external component requirement is ideal for a wide variety of embedded computer vision devices on the applications of handsets, tablets, laptops, other consumer electronics, automobiles, surveillance and Internet of Things.”

The HM1062 operates up to 60 fps in 720p HD resolution, and up to 120 fps in binning or sub-sampling mode over MIPI CSI2. The HM1062 is currently sampling and scheduled for mass production by the second quarter of 2017.

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Mobileye CTO & Chairman Amnon Shashua delivers a keynote at Bosch ConnectedWorld Conference 2017:

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Teledyne and e2v jointly announce the successful completion of the acquisition by Teledyne of e2v. The aggregate value for the transaction was approximately £627M (or approximately $789M) taking into account e2v stock options and net debt as of September 2016. For the year ended March 31, 2016, e2v had sales of approximately £236M. Excluding transaction-related expenses, Teledyne management expects the transaction to be accretive to earnings per share.

“Every business within e2v is highly complementary to Teledyne and will contribute to our balanced portfolio of highly engineered products. From industrial machine vision to space-based imaging... our respective capabilities and engineering-centric cultures are truly a great fit,” said Robert Mehrabian, Chairman, President and CEO of Teledyne. “We are proud to continue e2v’s 70-year legacy of innovation and specialized high technology products. In addition, e2v adds greater critical mass and technical resources to Teledyne in key locations, including the United Kingdom; Grenoble, France; and Seville, Spain.”

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Yole publishes its analysis of Intel-Mobileye deal, mostly saying that both companies need each other to compete on the heated autonomous driving would-be market. Yole predicts the 2020-s will be the decade of sensing:


The autonomous vehicles take-off is expected in 5-10 years from now:


And some market data:

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Nikkei: Panasonic prepares a restructuring plan to improve its financial performance. As a part of the plan, Panasonic contemplates selling its share in TowerJazz-Panasonic JV: "In the chip business, the company is weighing unloading shares in a joint venture with an Israeli enterprise."

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It came to my attention that CRC Press released "High Performance CMOS Range Imaging: Device Technology and Systems Considerations" by Andreas Suss in 2016. The book appears to be a version of Andreas Suss 2014 PhD Thesis, freely available on Duisburg University site.

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MIT Center for Brains, Minds and Machines publishes a lecture "The Convergence of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence Towards Enabling Autonomous Driving" by Amnon Shashua, Mobileye CTO and Chairman, that has been live streamed yesterday. The lecture also has a nice Q&A session starting 0:51:00 time, the camera requirements questions start at 1:08:34:



Thanks to DS for the link!

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AutomotiveNews: Magna VP Joel Gibson said the total market value for camera-based driver assistance systems is “growing very quickly” and he expects it to be worth about $10b per year by 2020. “It’s a very large growth area for Magna,” he said. Magna expects its car camera business to grow to $1B from the current $450M per year.

On another automotive news, AutoSens publishes a tutorial "What is LiDAR and why is it so important to driverless cars?" explaining the LiDAR basics and its strengths and weaknesses.

In yet another automotive news, NYTimes reports a use case for an in-car camera: "In France, Valeo, another supplier of automotive technology, is developing an infrared camera system that will monitor children in the rear seat as well as the driver’s shoulder, neck and head movements, looking for deviations from the norm.

Checking body temperature and even how the driver is dressed, the system will also be able to customize the interior temperature for each driver, said Guillaume Devauchelle, the company’s innovation director."

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Systemplus Consulting publishes reverse engineering report of ST SPAD-based proximity sensor inside Apple iPhone 7 Plus. "The custom Apple device measures 2.80 mm x 2.40 mm, half the size of the rest of STMicroelectronics’s portfolio." VCSEL is integrated on top of the SPAD sensor chip:

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ST kindly permitted me to publish few slides from Bruce Rae presentation "Fully industrialised Foundry SPAD in an optimised 130nm CMOS imaging technology" at Image Sensors Europe in London, UK, on March 15, 2017:

Update: ST asked me to add a following statement:

"STM adds SPADs to its CIS foundry business in addition to its advanced CIS processes and pixels. STM is now enriching its CIS foundry offer with access to its 130nm CMOS SPAD technology. The fully industrialized SPAD pixel and associated IPs, shipped in more than 250 Million of STM’s FlightSenseTM technology based products, is now available to STM customers under a foundry business model. Customers can now benefit from more than 10 years of R&D, as well as a proven, reliable, high volume capable supply chain. Regular MPW shuttles are planned, starting in Sept 2017."

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Digitimes: Taiwan-based Coasia Microelectronics and Sunnic Technology & Merchandise, report 17.7% and 18% YoY sales growth, according to industry sources. Coasia distributes CMOS sensors mainly for Samsung, while Sunnic sells Sony's CMOS sensors.

The growth in demand in 2017 has been attributed to a growing number of new smartphones including entry-level and mid-range models that will feature a dual-lens setup, said Digitimes sources.

Indeed, even $65 phones such as DooGee Shoot 2 feature dual 5MP rear camera these days:

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EETimes quotes Yole's analyst Pierre Cambou findings that ST SPAD imager might appear in the oncoming Apple iPhone 8. Few quotes:

"Yole’s educated guess is that ST is bringing a brand new 3D (array) imager to Apple iPhone 8 — an innovation that will alter the phone’s user interface.

Here’s a fact: As many as 10 Apple engineers have been working on imaging in Grenoble over the last few years. Their presence is open knowledge among locals, according to Cambou. The local newspaper reported last summer that Apple signed a lease with the city of Grenoble to open a research and development center there. The 800-square-meter facility will reportedly focus on imaging components and employ about thirty engineers.

Cambou suspects that ST could be using Silicon on insulator (SOI)-based wafers for the new SPAD 3D imagers. He said, “This is the way people have been doing BSI in the Grésivaudan valley (in Crolles…) for a long time.”

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Embedded Vision publishes Rockchip article comparing its AP image processing engine with one from Apple:

"The RK1608 utilizes the CEVA-XM4 DSP core to perform frame-based processing, rather than line-based as in ISP. Because it is specifically designed for image processing, it can perform much faster than a standard AP. It includes features like multi frame de-noise, zig-zag HDR for preview and capture, HDR processing of multi-exposed image, depth map generation, super resolution and pseudo optical zoom. The vision coprocessor’s function is not dependent on the ISP, so it can be adapted to any platform.

One phone already available on the market that uses the RK1608 for enhanced photography, is the ASUS ZenFone 3 Zoom smartphone, launched earlier this year at CES 2017. If there was ever a phone that truly threatened DSLRs, this is it. This device was designed to be a camera just as much as it was designed to be a phone. The aperture, pixel size and sensor are among the largest in the industry at f/1.7, 1.4µm and 1/2.55”, respectively. It uses new SuperPixel camera technology for clearer images at night or in low-light environments and offers 2.5-times greater light sensitivity than the Apple iPhone 7 Plus."

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e2v publishes a nice paper explaining CCD properties in soft X-Ray band. Few quotes:


"On average, 3.6 eV is required for each free signal electron emitted from the silicon atom after absorption of an X-ray photon [20], with variance as per the Fano factor. The complete absorption of a 500 eV X-ray photon produces on average approximately (500 / 3.6) = 139 signal electrons, but a large number of steps are involved in this absorption."

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ON Semi publishes Michael DeLuca talk at Vision Show held in Stuttgart, Germany, in Nov. 2016:

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EETimes publishes an article on its visit of Chronocam. Few quotes:

"Chronocam’s sensor technology is designed to acquire data that’s simplified and tailored for machines to use. This dramatically reduced data load should allow cars to make almost real-time decisions.

Even the slightest hint of a market revolution is exciting to any inventor of a new technology. This isn’t a thrill, however, that stirs the incumbents who supply conventional image sensors.

With that resistance in place, it it’s tough to convincing others to consider a path they’ve never taken before. Talking them into embracing it, joining the revolution and building “an eco-system” is not a job for the fainthearted. Chronocam’s CEO Verre, however, is undeterred.

He cited three key advantages Chronocam’s event-driven sensor can provide. “We generate much less data, we enable faster reaction time, and we operate at a much wider dynamic range,” he explained.

Chronocam’s market positioning, however, has shifted significantly in one respect. Chronocam now believes, in entering the ADAS/autonomous car market, it doesn’t need to chart a collision course with an entire community of incumbent CMOS image sensor suppliers. Different from what we heard from the startup a year ago, Chronocam today is pitching its technology as one of the several different sensors to be added to ADAS/autonomous cars for safety."

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Raptor Photonics publishes a whitepaper explaining EMCCD generations differences. For some reason, ON Semi's EMCCD is not in the table, although the whitepaper is relatively new, dated by 2016/11:

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Albert Theuwissen discusses imager's Dynamic Range definition and factors that often make a measured DR be lower than one specified in the datasheet.

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Canon Watch site noticed Egami article on Canon sensor with curved periphery portion, said to improve lens vignetting:


Update: Mirrorless Rumors site posted another patent from Egami , this time applied by Toshiba for a curved sensor:

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Nikkei: Tamron announces successful development of an innovative image sensor technology, with support of Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) of National Research and Development Agency, that enhances imaging capability far exceeding that of human vision, featuring ultra-high light sensitivity and WDR.

The new technology is said to enhance both sensitivity and DR, which has been considered difficult in the past. The ultra-high sensitivity enables capturing clear color images even under an extreme low brightness of 0.003 lux, which is darker than starlight. The WDR performance is exceeding 140dB.


Three key technologies - Optics, Image Sensor, and Image Processing - have been identified essential, and their effective integration has been studied for the new imaging technology:


This development is supported by Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST), Adaptable and Seamless Technology transfer Program through Target-driven R&D (A-STEP).

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Brigates publishes fairly detailed datasheets of its image sensors with characterization data. It's a brave move as some of the parameters are quite far from the state of the art.

BG0703 is a 1MP 1/2.7-inch rolling shutter image sensor aimed to high-end surveillance and industrial imaging markets:


A newer and improved 1080p 1/3-inch BG0803 targets the same market:

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French-language site Challenges reports that ST has signed a huge contract with Apple for image sensors, which will boost the workload at its Crolles plants, where fifty new machines are being installed. The influx of this and other new orders allows the Crolles 200mm fab to reach utilization rate of 100%, while Crolles 300mm plant utilization exceeds 80%. When questioned, ST group refused to comment.

Possibly, the French site talks about ST AF ToF sensors used in iPhone 7.

Thanks to SL for the link!

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MediaTek announces its plan to bring ADAS vision solutions to the automotive industry beginning Q1 2017:

"Reimagined from the ground up, MediaTek’s ADAS system will feature cutting-edge, decentralized Vision Processing Unit (VPU) solutions to optimally handle large amounts of real-time visual streaming data. MediaTek employs Machine Learning to increase the accuracy and speed of detection, recognition and tracking, making it more comparable to human decision-making performance."

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Reuters, NYT: Intel will provide a SoC for autonomous vehicle systems that Delphi and Mobileye are developing together, Glen De Vos, Delphi's VP Engineering said. Delphi is testing autonomous driving technology in vehicles in Singapore. By the end of this year, Delphi hopes to choose a city in the United States to launch a test fleet of self-driving cars during 2017, De Vos said. The company is also looking for test site in a European city.

Delphi and Mobileye will demo their self-driving vehicle system at the CES in Las Vegas in January. That system will use current, electromechanical laser imaging technology, or LIDAR, that is too expensive for use in consumer vehicles, he said. Delphi is also working with Quanergy Systems, a maker of solid-state LIDAR systems.

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Novus Light discusses Sony proprietary Scalable Low Voltage Signalling with an Embedded Clock (SLVS-EC) interface, which debuts in the company's next generation of image sensors for industrial applications. The interface has been mentioned quite a long time ago in Sony papers such as this one, allowing to output signal independently from 4 corners of the chip:


In SLVS-EC, the clock signal is embedded in the data and recovered by dedicated circuitry on the receive side. Since the signals are then less sensitive to skew, the data can be transmitted at much higher data rates and over much further distances. Each of the SLVDS-EC channels can support speeds of up to 2.304Gbit/sec. The result is that a sensor that supports the new standard will be able to transfer data over eight links at a data rate of 1.84GBytes/sec (80% of full bandwidth due to 8b10b encoding).

I'm not sure what is the difference between MIPI M-PHY and SLVDS-EC, but Sony promotes its high speed:

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ARMdevices interviews Jem Davies, ARM VP of Technology, Imaging and Vision Group. Jem talks about imaging and vision strategy at ARM and says that Huawei will be one of the first licensees of its imaging ad vision technology in smartphones:



Jem Davies ARM Techcon 2016 presentation video posted on Nov. 22 has been updated, so that its end part is not cut anymore.

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LIPS receives 2016 Golden Torch Innovation Award from Outstanding Enterprise Manager Associate in Taiwan for the technologies behind its depth camera innovation.

LIPS Founder & CEO Luke Liu receiving award from the  former Taiwan’s vice president Dwen-Yi Wu

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AutoSens 2016 kindly permitted me to post a couple of slides from Softkinetic presentation "3D depth-sensing for automotive: bringing awareness to the next generation of (autonomous) vehicles" by Daniel Van Nieuwenhove. A good part of the presentation compares ToF with active and passive stereo solutions:

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According to BusinessKorea sources, Samsung is contemplating to split its semiconductor business into a fabless and foundry divisions:

"Samsung Electronics’ System LSI business division is largely divided into four segments; system on chip (SoC) team which develops mobile APs, LSI development team, which designs display driver chips and camera sensors, foundry business team and support team. According to many officials in the industry, Samsung Electronics is now considering forming the fabless division by uniting the SoC and LSI development teams and separating from the foundry business."

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NikonRumors quotes Egami talking about Nikon patent application with 2-layered pixel array forming a cross-type PDAF: "Nikon patent application is to use the two imaging elements having different phase difference detection direction in order to achieve a cross-type AF."


Thanks to TG for the link!

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