Archives for February 2015

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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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