Archives for March 2015

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PRNewswire: Dual Aperture International ("DAI") announces a strategic partnership with SK Telecom ("SKT") in a development of DAI's 3D camera technology based on dual aperture 4-color (RGB-IR) sensors. SKT becomes a strategic investor and partner to DAI alongside a $1.4M investment, joining the previously closed $5.7M Series A funding round led by Korean venture capital fund Value Invest Korea.

SKT will develop applications and additional use cases for DAI's 3D image capture, virtual reality and image enhancement technologies. Prof. Chong-Min Kyung, CTO of DAI, commented that, "SKT is a global technology leader with the size and expertise to accelerate DAI's product implementation into global industries spanning mobile, medical, security and automotives. Korea already has a strong technological position in these growing industries, and the partnership between SKT and DAI will only further improve Korea's ability to provide innovative technologies and solutions to these markets."

In Korea, DAI will continue to refine its own technology while SKT will help define new applications for 3D cameras. In the US, DAI and SK Telecom Americas (SKTA) will jointly set up a consumer applications development lab under SKTA's Innopartners program in order to recruit innovators to develop new 3D, virtual reality, image related applications for various markets including Mobile, Medical, Security and Automobile applications.

DAI will also collaborate with Daejeon Creative Economy Innovation Center of the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning, in actively looking for technologies and patents to foster globally competitive start-ups.

Dual Apertures technology is presented in its patent here.

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Sony reports its quarterly results for the quarter ended on Jan 31, 2014. Essentially, the report confirms the company's Feb. 2015 forecast for the image sensor sales:


Sony earnings release says on Devices segment results: "Sales increased 38.6% year-on-year (a 26% increase on a constant currency basis) to 292.9 billion yen (2,421 million U.S. dollars). This significant increase was primarily due to a significant increase in sales of image sensors reflecting higher demand for mobile products, the favorable impact of foreign exchange rates, as well as a significant increase in sales of camera modules. Sales to external customers increased 47.2% year-on-year."

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CMOSIS is to start sampling low-cost versions of its global shutter CMV2000 (2.2MP/340fps) and CMV4000 (4.2MP/180fps) imagers in May 2015. The new versions differentiate from their CMV equivalents by their IC package, being LCC (Leadless Ceramic Carrier) instead of µPGA. The company is to offer the CMV2000/ CMV4000 imagers at about half the price of the current µPGA versions for volumes over 5000 pcs/year. Besides being lower priced, the LCC-type package offers the additional benefit of surface mount assembly, allowing more compact cameras designs and more economical camera assembly.

"We are delighted to explore new and highly attractive market segments for our proven state-of-the-art CMV product line", said Lou Hermans, COO of CMOSIS. "The LCC packaging format will open up a host of high-volume applications and further broaden our strong worldwide position and customer base for advanced camera designs."

CMOSIS sensor in the new package

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One of the biggest European machine vision camera vendors, Stemmer Imaging, posts a Q&A session with Mark Williamson, its Director of Corporate Market Development, on Sony decision to discontinue CCD products. Generally, Mark agrees that CCD era is over, although "The importance of the CCD to mankind was recognized by a Nobel prize in Physics in 2009. In the last few years there has been a big shift from CCD to CMOS in these high volume markets which has left the CCD wafer line very underutilized even with the high number of machine vision sensors sold. This makes the factory no longer financially viable."

Other quotes:

"In 2010, 22% of cameras we sold were based on CMOS sensors. This has risen to 58% in 2014 with 32% of cameras using Sony CCDs and the remainder other high end CCDs. With nearly all new camera designs using CMOS the prediction is that in a further 4 years the natural shift would make the CMOS market share approximately 80%."

"The higher end CCDs from ON Semiconductor (formerly Truesense and Kodak) and the full frame CCDs used in professional photography from Teledyne DALSA are still available for high end applications although over time CMOS will affect this market segment also."

IMV Europe too publishes an article on the Sony CCD news, mostly quoting machine vision camera vendors reports.

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When Sony curved sensors were presented on summer 2014, there were concerns about their compatibility with zoom lens. Palo Alto, CA-based Optiz proposes a solution. The company believes that curved sensors will be the next big wave in mobile imaging:


Optiz does not say much about the principle of its approach, other than usual marketing words:

"Optiz's proprietary Zoom solution realizes Zoom function in the mobile imaging system without the drawback of conventional solutions."

"Optiz's proprietary pixel architecture technology includes pixel pattern design, photodiode structure and advanced imaging algorithms. With inventive thinking, we have re-imagined these three crucial aspects of the pixel technology and made great advancements in zooming, luminance and color accuracy. All doing so without creating additional complexity to the imaging system while enabling zoom function and reduce module size."

"Our innovative solution offers an optical interface structure that is built into the image sensor chip, thus imaging system need fewer lenses, simplifies the overall optical design and improves image quality."

"Optiz's Zoom solution offers a set of proprietary technology to enable greater sensitivity, lower module profile, superior zooming and dynamic focusing capabilities all without moving parts."

"The innovative pixel architecture provides significant advantages such as reduced cross talk between the pixels at the periphery of the sensor, substantial improvement of Quantum efficiency."

The company has been founded by Vage Oganesian, former Tessera VP R&D, and Wang Wei, CEO of WLCSP. Few pictures from the company site might give some hints on its technology:


Update: I received an email from Optiz saying:

"In regards to the comments on the blog post. We want to clarify that our curved sensor with varying size photodetector does not require physical bending/deformation of the image sensor. We took a conceptually different approach in obtaining the curved structure of image sensor during the fabrication process; So that our image sensor can remain stackable as most of the commercial BSI sensors of today."

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Belgian economics newspaper Trends.be names CMOSIS as one of the fastest growing companies in Antwerp, Belgium. Google translates:

"In medium businesses CMOSIS is the fastest growing. The company develops and produces image sensors for industrial, scientific and medical applications. Think of image chips for aerospace and sensors for the cameras from Leica. Also in the cameras for speed checks on Belgian roads are sensors CMOSIS. However, 99% of sales come from exports, with Germany, France, Italy, Japan, Korea, China, the US and Canada as key markets.

Sales in 2009 amounted to 1.9 million euros. In 2013 it was already 36 million, and 2014 ended with 53 million euros. "We are in a growth market - the number of cameras in our visual society will only increase," says CEO Luc De Mey that surge. "We also have as a niche player on highly sophisticated and well-patented technology, our sensors have a high image quality and a very large number of frames per second."

Since January 2014, the US investment firm TA Associates, 80% of the shares, the remaining 20% ​​is in the six founders, who are all active in the business. "As long as it goes well, we can go our own way." CMOSIS has 110 people on the payroll, including 75 in Berchem, the rest in the branches in Germany and Portugal. "The growth of our company is limited by the number of people we can find with expertise in this specialized field."

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PR Newswire: XMC, a Wuhan, China-based 300mm wafer foundry, announces it has shipped over 100 million BSI CMOS image sensor units. All of the BSI CIS units are high end products ranging from 5MP to 23MP by using wafer bonding technology. In addition, the state of the art 3D wafer stacking technology developed by XMC for BSI CIS has also entered volume production now. It is said to indicate that XMC has become one of the leading BSI CIS and 3D IC manufacturing companies in the world.

The R&D of wafer-level BSI technology started in the second half of 2012. It took over one year of joint effort with an unnamed XMC's partner to reach mass production at the beginning of 2014. A year later, the more advanced 3D wafer stacking, based on the BSI technology, has also been successfully developed.

"With the offering of the advanced wafer stacking technology, XMC enables its partners to enlarge the share of high-end CIS market," Shaoning Mei, CTO at XMC said, "We will further enhance our 3D IC expertise on the basis of 3D wafer stacking technology, by which we can achieve high performance and low power through directly connecting the core parts of two chips. 3D IC is expected to be an important technology to keep us on track with Moore's Law. It is also the key strength for XMC to establish its leadership in 3D IC industry."

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In the wake of CCD discontinuation news, Adimec blog starts a series of posts comparing them with CMOS sensors. Adimec looks at QE/Read Noise metric and notes that today's CMOS sensors became better than CCDs, while in a similar 2011 comparison, CCDs were the winner:

QE/RN in 2011

QE/RN in 2015

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Rambus: Tom’s Hardware announces that Rambus lensless smart sensors (LSS) won the “Best Of” (hardware) award for Mobile World Congress 2015, the second year in a row.

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Unispectral, Israel, Tel Aviv University-originated startup proposes to move sequential color imaging into camera modules. The claim is that switching Bayer filter for a sequential design increases the camera resolution by a factor of 4, and the low light sensitivity by a factor of 2. These claims are presented in Optics Express paper "Sequential filtering for color image acquisition" by Ariel Raz and David Mendlovic. (David Mendlovic used to be the manager of Tessera camera module design and now serves as CEO of Corephotonics.)

Vimeo video shows the new company's promise:



Older project info at Tel Aviv University site says that they use a tunable filter for the sequential imaging and that "Comparing with a Bayer scheme, for green the sensor provides 2 times more resolution, and for red and blue 4 times more resolution."

Thanks to WRWWCTB for the pointer!

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Mike Electric publishes a Youtube video full of FLIR Lepton imager microphotographs:



Meanwhile, FLIR Lepton family has grown to 3 different modules:

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i-Micronews: Yole Developpement publishes an interview with Yasuhiro Ueda, SVP Corporate Executive, Senior General Manager of the Image Sensor Business Division at Sony. There are quite a few interesting points there. Few quotes:

Yole: Sony was a leader in the charge-coupled device (CCD) legacy technology and succeeded in the transition to CMOS, becoming the undisputed leader in 2014. Could you explain how Sony, as an image sensor company, has succeeded in beating the odds of disruption and did not end up like Kodak, IBM, or Nokia?

Yasuhiro Ueda: The book “Innovator’s Dilemma” describes how disruptive technologies impacted the disk drive industry and how existing players unable to properly adopt the transition fell behind. This may have been the case for the companies you mentioned. In addition the book also describes how technologies can be among the extended lines of product evolution. We didn’t position CMOS image sensors as a revolutionary, disruptive, product totally different to CCDs but instead found them to be among the extended lines of our CCD evolution. Transition necessities in CCD were led by our customer’s needs for taking high definition videos. CCD works fine handling 480p SD resolution videos but higher speed HD is difficult. As a sensor division it was then just a matter of course to consider our transition to CMOS sensors, as they have much greater speed advantages. We didn’t position this move as anything innovative as the evolution was a process driven by our customers’ needs.

Yole: How do you see the overall evolution of the industry in areas such as M&A and the business models of the players? How do you see the consolidation of the industry? 2014 has been a very important year with much consolidation. Is Sony interested in taking part in it?

Yasuhiro Ueda: When we see the players they all have different roles in the market and from this point of view we don’t think there will be a necessity for further consolidation. Having said we find there are too many module makers today and we feel this is where the need to consolidate will arise.

Source: Status of the CIS industry 2015 report, Yole, Feb 2015

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Rambus, along with partners MLove and IXDS, hosted “Eyes of the IoT” MWC 2015 workshop in Barcelona, Spain, devoted to brainstorming on the possible uses of lensless image sensors. Some suggestions:

"Lars Stalling of Telefonica/Canoe Lab – who headed the smart transport group – suggested LSS technology could be used to help pedestrians navigate crowded cities like Barcelona and New York by introducing a wearable third eye."

Harald Neidhardt of MLove proposed “Lensless smart sensors [which are approximately the size of a human hair], are small enough to be painted on city walls and street signs to supplement existing safety requirements and help make true intelligent lighting a reality. We call this concept 'City Glaze'.”

Reto Wettach of IXDS said “We’re thinking about enabling ultra-smart appliances such as a refrigerator that is capable of sensing what groceries need to be ordered and what food items are close to their expiration date. LSS is inexpensive, low-powered and small enough to make it the right technology to bring intelligent appliances to the next level.”

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ON Semi Analyst Day presentation dated by Feb. 26, 2015 discusses its image sensors strategy:

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International Image Sensors Workshop 2015 pre-registration is open now. Registration is limited to approximately 150 attendees on a first-come, first-served basis. Registration will be guaranteed for presenters, but they are still required to register. Past experience shows that registration is often filled to capacity within a few days’ time.

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Xilinx demos its SDSoC Design Environment promising a quick path from C++ algorithms to FPGA hardware:

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Courthouse News Service: A federal judge preliminary approved a $12.5M class settlement that claims that OmniVision misled shareholders into believing it had an exclusive contract related to the Apple iPhone 4. Shareholders claimed that the company CFO Anson Chan made false and misleading statements about the technological advantages of its image sensor versus its competitors', and its competitive position with customers such as Apple. These misrepresentations deceived the market into believing that OmniVision was maintaining its exclusive position as the supplier of image sensors for iPhone 4, causing Omnivision's stock to be artificially inflated, according to the lawsuit.

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Vision Systems Design publishes a nice collection of various companies announcements of Sony stopping CCD production. Among them are Framos video, IDS announcement, and a private email from Vision Components saying that just one CCD model, the B&W 1.4MP, 6.45um pixel ICX285, escaped the axe so far:

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EETimes: TechInsights and eSoftThings analysed power consumption of 3 smart glasses: Google Glass, Vuzix M100, and Optinvent AR Glasses. Imaging functions consume the major power in all three devices:

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Rambus announces its Partners-in-Open-Development (POD) program in collaboration with design firms frog and IXDS to promote the adoption of its lensless smart sensor (LSS) technology.

"Our Partners-in-Open-Development provides a great opportunity for innovators to develop technology for a smarter world. With this program, we encourage developers across the globe to join in to create new products that introduce real-world IoT applications that will touch so many parts of our lives. This is the first step toward expanding the accessibility of an ecosystem that will foster a new generation of innovation," said Gary Bronner, VP of Rambus Labs.

"Our work with lensless smart sensors through the POD program is helping to pave the way for innovations that are sure to inspire and become ubiquitous throughout our lives," said Andrew Zimmerman, president of frog. "The opportunity to partner with Rambus, through our R&D platform frogLabs and other organizations, to build out the burgeoning sensor ecosystem means we are helping to propel solutions that can be adopted much more quickly."

"Opening its innovative lensless smart technology to the developer community enables Rambus to promote what promises to be a robust, intelligent ecosystem around this new approach to sensing and imaging," said Dr. Reto Wettach, founder and design director with IXDS. "We are proud to be among the inaugural POD partners and look forward to being among the first contributors to identify and expand upon existing IoT-based applications for this technology."

Tom's Hardware publishes a nice article accompanied by a Youtube interview with Patrick Gill on the new developments:

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Business Wire: Forza Silicon announces that researchers at NHK presented the design architecture and specifications of the 133MP 60fps CMOS image sensor at ISSCC 2015. The image sensor presented by NHK was designed by Forza Silicon and fabricated using a 0.18 µm 3.3V/1.8V process with 1D stitching.

To date conventional image sensors for 8K applications have used 8 MP and 33 MP solutions in large optical formats. In order to eliminate the bulky lens/color-prism optical system of previous generation cameras, the team developed a single-chip 133 MP image sensor. The sensor takes advantage of Forza Silicon’s Gen 3 readout architecture to achieve frame frequency of 60 fps. The Gen 3 readout architecture uses a pseudo-column parallel design with 14b redundant successive approximation register ADCs to achieve a throughput of 128 Gb/s at full resolution and frame rate.

“Our continued partnership with Forza Silicon through the years to support NHK has resulted in the success of a number of significant projects such as the development of the 133 MP sensor, and previously the 33 MP Super Hi-Vision image sensor. Forza’s dedicated support and its image sensor design expertise enabled us to achieve the Super Hi-Vision 8K single-chip camera — the largest pixel count of any video image sensor,” said Dr. Hiroshi Shimamoto, senior research engineer at NHK Science & Technology Research Laboratories (STRL).

“The advanced research and development initiatives by NHK continue to push the boundaries for UHDTV broadcast experiences. NHK’s next-generation digital broadcast systems stem from their long heritage as the world’s premier R&D center for broadcast camera technology. The groundbreaking technologies we’ve jointly developed have evolved over a span of 10 years as a result of our tight collaboration, and Forza’s decades of design experience and wide selection of silicon-proven IP,” said Barmak Mansoorian, president & co-founder at Forza Silicon.

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Business Wire: Keeping up with its production schedule in the early product announcement, Toshiba starts mass production of the T4KA7, a 20MP, 1/2.4-inch CMOS sensor based on 1.12um BSI pixels. The sensor makes possible the realization of 20MP mobile camera modules with a height of 6mm or less.

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Smithers Image Sensors Auto conference to be held on June 23-25 in Brussels, Belgium announces a list of confirmed speakers including:

• Henrik Lind
  Technical Expert
  Volvo Car Corporation
• Martin Edney
  Lead Systems Engineer Rear & Surround Cameras Advanced Driver Assistance Systems
  Jaguar Land Rover
• Kevin Lu
  Global Manager - Optical Engineering, Product Architect - Image Vision Systems
  Magna Electronics
• Salah Hadi
  Global R&D Director Vision & Night Vision Systems
  Autoliv
• Riccardo Mariani
  CTO
  Yogitech
• Benjamin Stauss
  R&D Engineer – Optical Camera Testing
  TriOptics

Also, Image Sensors publishes an interview with Markus Rossi, Chief Innovation Officer, Heptagon on the company's 3D imaging solutions. Few quotes:

"Optimizing image sensors for 3D imaging is an opportunity, since those system typically have different optical requirement and layout. A key aspect of Heptagon’s products their small mechanical form factor. A novel, wafer-based camera assembly technology - called “FCP” - reduces the mechanical complexity of the camera and projection modules and therefore enables high turn-over, passive alignment manufacturing methods."

"One example for a very important component in depth sensing is the so-called IR illuminator. Our miniature illumination systems are optimised for uniform illumination in ToF applications, pattern generators for contrast enhancement in active stereo as well as structured light systems. Each of this systems needs to be tuned for best optical performance (efficiency, contrast, …) and smallest form factor (need to fit into mobile devices)."

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Digitimes posts an article on Taiwan and China CIS foundries. Few quotes:

"TSMC has been the major CIS module production partner for OmniVision although the module vendor is also outsourcing part of its production to China-based XMC. However, the partnership between TSMC and OmniVision may change in the future as China-based Hua Capital, an investment firm, has offered a bid to acquire OmniVision, indicated the sources.

UMC has tied up with STMicroelectronics to develop 65nm BSI CIS technology and is currently producing BSI products at its Fab 12i in Singapore."

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Marketwired: Teledyne Dalsa new dental Xineos models, including the 1511, 1501 and 2301 utilize Teledyne DALSA's sixth generation radiation-hard CMOS active pixel design with active areas of 15x11cm, 152x7mm, and 228x7mm respectively. The new sensors offer switchable saturation dose, low dissipation power and built-in gain, offset and defect correction.

"With the addition of our new Xineos CMOS X-Ray detectors, we're offering dental equipment manufacturers a complete portfolio of more versatile, more flexible, lower dose and cost effective options to satisfy a wider range of dental practices," commented Dr. Mila Heeman, Senior Marketing Manager at Teledyne DALSA. "Our detectors allow dentists to offer a more precise diagnosis as a result of our continued commitment to improving CMOS X-Ray technology."

Xineos range of X-Ray sensors features high frame rate in range of 30-45fps. Dalsa Youtube video demos X-ray imaging at high speed:

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ON Semi demos its OIS solution in this Youtube video. The frequency range of the company's demo covers 1Hz to 10Hz camera shake speed, a bit slow for consumer cameras, but might fit to some other applications:

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PRNewswire: Mobileye introduces its 4th generation system-on-chip, the EyeQ4, consisting of 14 computing cores out of which 10 are specialized vector accelerators for visual processing and understanding. The first design win for EyeQ4 has been secured for a global premium European car manufacturer for production to start in early 2018. The EyeQ4 would be part of a scalable camera system starting from monocular processing for collision avoidance applications, in compliance with EU NCAP, US NHSTA and other regulatory requirements, up to trifocal camera configuration supporting high-end customer functions including semi-autonomous driving. The EyeQ4 would support fusion with radars and scanning-beam lasers in the high-end customer functions.

"Supporting a camera centric approach for autonomous driving is essential as the camera provides the richest source of information at the lowest cost package. To reach affordable high-end functionality for autonomous driving requires a computing infrastructure capable of processing many cameras simultaneously while extracting from each camera high-level meaning such as location of multiple types of objects, lanes and drivable path information," said Amnon Shashua, cofounder, CTO and Chairman of Mobileye. "The EyeQ4 continues a legacy that began in 2004 with EyeQ1 where we leveraged deep understanding of computer vision processing to come up with highly optimized architectures to support extremely intensive computations at automotive compliant power consumption of 2-3 Watts."

The EyeQ4 provides "super-computer" capabilities of more than 2.5 teraflops within a low-power (approximately 3W) automotive grade system-on-chip.

EyeQ4-based ADAS uses computer vision algorithms like Deep Layered Networks and Graphical Models while processing information from 8 cameras simultaneously at 36fps. The EyeQ4 will accept multiple camera inputs from a trifocal front-sensing camera configuration, surround-view-systems of four wide field of view cameras, a long range rear-facing camera and information from multiple radars and scanning beam lasers scanners. Taken together, the EyeQ4 will be processing a safety "cocoon" around the vehicle – essential for autonomous driving.

Engineering samples of EyeQ4 are expected to be available by Q4 2015. First test hardware with the full suite of applications including active safety suite of customer functions, environmental modeling (for each of the 8 cameras), path planning for hands-free driving and fusion with sensors, is expected to be available in Q2 2016.


Thanks to MM for the link!

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GlobeNewswire: TowerJazz begins mass production of an IR sensor used by Intel in one of its new 3D sensing solutions. Intel chose TowerJazz's 0.11um IS11 process, due to its pixel performance in NIR combined with high speed, high QE and high optical resolution. The unique pixel developed by TowerJazz for Intel is a 3.5um global shutter very fast pixel that allows high QE in NIR, specifically at the scanning laser wavelength with high sensor resolution.

"Partnering with TowerJazz was a part of our success in producing our advanced image sensor for 3D imaging and was a natural choice as they were able to offer the required technical specifications and performance for this breakthrough technology," said Sagi Ben Moshe, Director Depth Camera Engineering, Intel Corporation.

"This collaboration between Intel and TowerJazz was a natural fit. Intel's leadership in this market, combined with our leading technology that provides outstanding pixel performance for near IR 3D imaging, along with the proximity of our Israel fab with Intel Israel, the group developing this technology, was an ideal alignment," said Russell Ellwanger, CEO, TowerJazz. "We are very excited to partner with Intel to produce lifestyle changing technology that will revolutionize the way we interact with devices in both our professional and personal lives. We highly value our business relationship with Intel and look forward to further collaboration on their sensing technology."

"It is truly amazing and thrilling to see our lengthy experience in the imaging field and our own CMOS image sensor technology developed in-house, combined with all of the R&D work we have undertaken for many years come to fruition in such a groundbreaking way," said Dr. Avi Strum, VP and GM, CMOS Image Sensor Business Unit, TowerJazz. "Intel sensing solutions will bring consumers new experiences and will change the way people capture and share 3D images. We are very proud of our work with Intel and our ability to assist them in bringing cutting-edge technologies to market quickly and in high volume."

TowerJazz stock jumped by 7.5% after the announcement:

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