Archives for April 2015

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Chipworks' openly available teardown report of Samsung Galaxy S6 has pictures of front and rear camera modules:

Front camera with Samsung S5K4E6 sensor

Rear camera module

Other than that, Chipworks publishes Seek Thermal/Raytheon microbolometric pixel picture, and Omnivision's first automotive BSI sensor OV10640 with 4.2um split HDR pixel:

Seek Thermal - Raytheon pixels

OV10640 automotive BSI sensor

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Light startup publishes its response on MIT Technology Review, The Daily Dot and other articles on its technology.

Light co-founder and CTO Rajiv Laroia tells to the Daily Dot "The system will enable people to easily carry a small, single device that offers true optical zoom with no protruding elements (we are currently prototyping 35mm-150mm), capture low-noise images even in low-light situations, and control depth-of-field and focus as part of the editing process."

The second Light co-founder and CEO Dave Grannan thinks that the additional power of the Light camera will eliminate the need for photo editors that populate most people’s phones. “Posting photos to social media has been a garbage-in-garbage-out process. If we can drastically improve the material going in by providing great imagery, the need for filters goes away and the overall experience is improved.”

The company expects its first builds to begin appearing in smartphones by 2016, giving people a 52MP camera in their pocket.

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MIT Technology Review publishes an article on a mysterious Palo-Alto, CA-based startup Light, mentioned in the blog almost a year ago. The new article reveals much more info on the company, its technology, and its plans:

"Light aims to put a bunch of small lenses, each paired with its own image sensor, into smartphones and other gadgets. They’ll fire simultaneously when you take a photo, and software will automatically combine the images. This way, Light believes, it can fit the quality and zoom of a bulky, expensive DSLR camera into much smaller, cheaper packages—even phones.

...the startup says it expects the first Light cameras, with 52-megapixel resolution, to appear in smartphones in 2016.

...an array of 16 camera modules with focal lengths of 35, 70, and 150 millimeters. ...when you take a picture with a Light camera it’s taking several pictures at the same time from slightly different perspectives (though it won’t show them to the user). The level of zoom that the user selects determines which modules will fire when he takes a picture, and where the mirror contained in each module moves to capture light. It could aim for light straight ahead, or off at an angle, for instance. The resulting shots are then digitally combined in a way that emulates a much bigger camera lens.

...Light is still in the early stages, as it doesn’t yet have a prototype of a full product completed.

Light plans to announce a deal on Tuesday with Foxconn, the world’s largest contract electronics manufacturer. Foxconn is licensing Light’s technology for use in mobile devices and is investing an undisclosed amount in the company."

A rendering of what a smartphone containing a Light camera might look like from the back.

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Youtube IBM Research channel posted a video of Tobi Delbruck's, ETH Professor and iNiLabs Co-founder, talk on silicon retinas:



Thanks to DSSB for the link!

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Albert Theuwissen renames his yearly Solid-State Imaging Forum to Harvest Imaging Forum, to be held on Dec. 10-11, 2015. This year the forum is devoted to 3D Time-of-Flight imaging. More information about the speaker and the agenda of the forum will follow in the coming weeks.

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EurekAlert: A research team led by Shree K. Nayar, Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University, has invented a prototype video camera, said to be the world's first fully self-powered - it can produce an image each second, indefinitely, of a well-lit indoor scene.

Self-Powered Pixel Design: The photodiode PD is operated in photovoltaic mode with zero bias. The voltage of the anode of PD increases to a level proportionate to the incident lightenergy. In this case PD draws zero power to produce a voltage proportionate to the incident light, and since it is not biased it does not produce any dark current. An important feature of the design is that emitter of transistor Q1 can be switched between ground (for resetting) and a power supply (for harvesting).

Self-powered sensor assembly

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Adimec continues its series of CCD vs CMOS sensor comparisons. The latest part shows that DTI in CMOS sensors, such as Sony IMX174, greatly improves MTF in NIR:

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Blackmagic Design announces a high performance 4.6K sensor for its URSA high end digital film cameras. The new Super 35 image sensor features high resolution of 4608 x 2592 at 120 fps and an wide 15 stops of DR for images that rival those shot on traditional 35mm film. The sensor also features "Professional global shutter for smooth pans and image motion," albeit at slower speed to allow a digital domain CDS, I'd guess.


(via FStopAcademy)

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Huawei P8 flagship smartphone announced today features "a new philosophy for camera design leveraging a combination of hardware, software and proprietary algorithms to help users capture beautiful photographs, even in the worst lighting conditions."

P8 camera sensor is claimed "The world’s first four-color RGBW sensor enhances brightness by 32 percent in high contrast lighting situations, reduces it by 78 percent in low light environments. DSLR-level independent image processor enabling noise reduction when shooting and intelligent detection of a high-contrast lighting environment." It's not clear what exactly makes Huawei camera "world's first RGBW," as other smartphones on the market already use sensors with white pixels in the array.

The camera also features "Industry-leading Optical Image Stabilizer technology up to 1.2°, enabling high-quality photos and videos, and managing camera shake so images are consistently sharp." For a very good image stabilizer one needs to have about 2-2.5deg range, but 1.2deg is not bad too.

About a half of Huawei P8 presentation is devoted to the camera (Youtube presentation is here):


Thanks to TS for the pointer!

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Digitimes: Dual-lens modules are becoming a mainstream solution for smartphone cameras starting 2015, says Alex Hsia, chairman for Taiwan-based digital camera ODM and lens solution provider Altek. Smartphone vendors' adoption of dual-lens modules for cameras is motivated by product differentiation, as most smartphones are quite similar in screen, processor, memory capacity and operating system specifications, Hsia said.

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WSJ, Techccrunch: Apple has acquired Israeli array camera-technology company LinX Computational Imaging Ltd. Apple confirmed the acquisition with its standard statement when it has bought a company: “Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.”

The companies had been discussing an acquisition price of about $20 million, according to people familiar with the matter. LinX was founded in 2011. Co-founders and principal shareholders Ziv Attar and Andrey Tovchigrechko are industry veterans. Before starting LinX, Mr. Attar served as a senior optics specialist at Israeli defense company Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd. Mr. Tovchigrechko led a team of algorithm developers at Samsung Israel.

Most of LinX web site has changed today and now shows very little info out of the rich content covered in the earlier posts here and here.

Few slides from the company presentation deck, now missing from its web site (sorry for too many pictures today):


Update: Globes reports "LinX had previously been in advanced talks to sell the company to both LG and Samsung and had even launched a successful pilot project with the latter but no agreement was ever reached on embedding the cameras into Samsung's smartphones."

Macrumors has uploaded the complete LinX June 2014 presentation on Sribd.

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Movidius announces that it has raised $40 million in new funding. The investment was led by Summit Bridge Capital (a collaboration between Atlantic Bridge Capital and WestSummit Capital) and includes new contributions from ARCH Venture Partners and Sunny Optical Technology Group, as well as early investors including Atlantic Bridge Capital, AIB Seed Capital Fund, Capital-E, DFJ Esprit and Robert Bosch Venture Capital. The funding is said to be the most significant investment in a fabless semiconductor company in the past two years.

“Movidius has pioneered an entirely new class of cost-effective, low power and high performance processors, software and development tools, and this platform enables our customers to implement visual sensing that aims to mirror human vision capabilities,” said Remi El-Ouazzane, CEO of Movidius. “This infusion of capital provides us with the resources to expand strategically, innovate constantly and extend our market leadership.”

A promotional Vimeo video talks about the company and its markets:

Movidius from One Net Marketing on Vimeo.

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Basler kindly sent me a presentation on its new 3D camera with Panasonic ToF sensors. Few slides from the presentation:


Basler ToF camera has received Vision System Magazine's Gold Innovation Award at Automate Show in Chicago at the end of March.

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JKU publishes a Google Hangout lecture on NVIDIA flexible ISP pipeline for mobile imaging application, delivered by Jan Kautz from Mobile Visual Computing research team at NVIDIA. The actual lecture starts at about 14:10 time:

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Chipworks teardown of Samsung flagship smartphone Galaxy S6 confirms that its primary camera sensor is Sony IMX240. IMX240 is a 16MP stacked chip, BSI sensor with a die size of 7.09 mm x 4.68 mm (33.2 mm2) featuring 1.12 µm pixel and an on-chip phase detection pixels for fast AF:


The front-facing camera is based on Samsung S5K4E6, a 5MP BSI sensor with a die size of 5.31 mm x 5.87 mm (31.2 mm2). The pixels have a 1.34 µm pitch:


Update: BusinessWire: IHS publishes Galaxy S6 Edge BOM where the front and rear cameras account for about 7% of the smartphone's cost:

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Digitimes, CTimes: Mediatek subsidiary MStar acquires Alpha Imaging Technology (AIT), a maker of image processors for consumer and security market. The acquisition price is, reportedly, NT$2.07 billion (US$66.37M). Historically, Mediatek owned 15% of Alpha Imaging stock and a number of Mediatek VPs sat at AIT board.

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BusinessWire: Ambarella announces the S2Lm-based battery-powered IP camera reference design for small, high-quality, battery-powered Full HD security cameras for both professional and consumer security applications. The reference design is based on Ambarella’s new S2Lm ultra low-power HD camera SoC, which can start recording 1080p30 video in less than 500ms from wake up, and provides up to six months of battery life. A Linux SDK is included for networking and customer applications including cloud streaming and analytics.

“Battery-powered IP cameras support new use cases that are relevant to a large segment of the security camera market,” said Chris Day, VP of Marketing and Business Development at Ambarella. “With no wires to worry about, S2Lm-based cameras can be installed in places where getting to a power outlet may be difficult. In addition, these cameras can be moved around for short term monitoring, without the need to reinstall the camera after every move.”

IP Camera design based on the Ambarella S2Lm

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Forza Silicon's patent application US20150090863 "Stacked Photodiodes for Extended Dynamic Range and Low Light Color Discrimination" by Barmak Mansoorian, Daniel Van Blerkom proposes two (or more) PDs stacked one on top of the other to enhance the pixel DR, and, to some extent, its low light color separation:

"The novel image sensors of the invention, and methods of using them, are based on various stacked photodiode pixel designs. In one aspect, the stacked photodiode pixels of the invention provide a means of extending dynamic range. The designs comprise, in an exemplary embodiment, an upper and a lower photodiode. In the event of a high photon flux wherein the upper photodiode becomes saturated, the attenuated light received by the lower photodiode may be used to determine the photon flux incident upon the pixel, extending the dynamic range of the system beyond what is capable with a single photodiode.

In another aspect, the stacked image sensors and associated methods of the invention provide a system for color discrimination in low light conditions. In combination with the signal received by the upper photodiode, the attenuated light signal received by the lower photodiode may be used to determine color, based on the predicted attenuation profile of the device, which is wavelength dependent."

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Tel Aviv University spin-off Unispectral proposing a sequential color imaging targets medical and remote analysis applications. Unispectral patented an MEMS optical component suitable for mass production and compatible with standard smartphone camera designs. The combination of this optical component and newly designed software is said to offer superior imaging performance and hyperspectral imaging capabilities. "The optical element acts as a tunable filter and the software — an image fusion library — would support this new component and extract all the relevant information from the image," said Prof. David Mendlovic, one of the Unispectral founders. According to Mendlovic, Unispectral is currently in advanced discussions with major smartphone makers, automotive companies, and wearable device makers to move the technology forward.

Foxnews publishes a video report on Unispectral technology and its applications:

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Marketwired: Omron announces the Human Vision Components (HVC) module. The HVC integrates Omron’s image sensing technology (OKAO Vision) along with a camera, processor, and external interface onto a single PCB, sized at 60x40 mm. Each HVC offers 10 functions, including face detection, face recognition, age estimation, gender estimation, facial pose estimation, gaze estimation, blink detection, facial expression estimation, hand detection and human body detection.


The company's Youtube video demos the system and gives application examples:



Techcrunch reports that Omron OKAO technology is used in Amazon Firephone to create 3D display effects.

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Sony SmartEyeglass uses 3MP camera for stills, although its video stream is limited to QVGA resolution and jpeg compression, probably, for power consumption reasons:

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Photron publishes a nice Youtube video on military applications of its high speed cameras:

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BBC reports that Intel has revealed a version of its 3D depth camera that is small and thin enough to fit into a 6-inch screen smartphone. The prototype was unveiled by the company CEO Brian Krzanich at an event in Shenzhen, China, although he did not demonstrate it working. The RealSense sensor can be used to recognise hand and head movements and makes it possible to change the focus of photos after they have been taken.


The official Intel PR says "Krzanich discussed how Intel RealSense cameras can provide intuitive, vision-based capabilities for solving complex problems and delivering exciting new usages and capabilities across a variety of form factors. To that end, he showed for the first time a 6-inch smartphone prototype with a new, longer-range Intel RealSense camera built into the device."

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Sony announces its plans to increase its production capacity for stacked CMOS image sensors in the fiscal year ending March 31, 2016 ("FY15"). This investment is intended primarily to augment production facilities used in the mastering processes and layering and futher downstream processes for stacked CMOS image sensors at Sony Semiconductor's Nagasaki Technology Center ("Nagasaki TEC") and Yamagata Technology Center ("Yamagata 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 investments such as the one announced in February and this supplementary investment, Sony plans to increase total production capacity for image sensors from the current level of approximately 60,000 12-inch wafers per month to the level of approximately 87,000 wafers per month by the end of September 2016. The total additional investment amount is projected to be approximately 45 billion yen, comprising approximately 24 billion yen of investments in Nagasaki TEC and approximately 21 billion yen of investments in Yamagata TEC.

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Toshiba Corporate R&D announces "a super high quality image processing technology that achieves image quality comparable to that of larger image sensors." The number of pixels in image sensors has been increasing year by year. However, the size of image sensors has not changed and this leads to increase of noise in the image because the amount of light received per pixel decreases as the pixel count increases. The long time exposure reduces image noise, but the image quality suffers due to camera shake. Conventionally, electronic image stabilization technology has been used to prevent image quality deterioration. In electronic image stabilization, several copies of the image are overlaid to compensate for the noise and a large amount of parallel memory is required to hold the multiple image copies. As a consequence, the noise reduction effect is limited by the number of image copies that can be kept in memory.

Toshiba has developed the processing technology significantly reducing noise and preventing camera shake without requiring a large amount of memory. This technology is said to generate a very sharp image with less noise by overlaying many continuously recorded images. The image is sequentially generated using the memory capacity required for just a single image. This new technology is said to effectively and precisely detect everything from tiny vibrations to large camera shake. Random noise is said to be canceled out by overlaying multiple images, and object edges are kept clear and crisp through the same process. The increase in the number of captured images makes it possible to obtain very high image quality using very little memory for storage. In particular, the technology is said to enable the users to produce extremely clear images at low light conditions.

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Octa Finance reports that Lensvector just filed form D reporting that it has raised $14.61 million financing. The Lensvector site newsline has an article in Chinese that describes its LCD AF technology:

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Sony announces IMX377, a 12MP, 1.55um pixel CMOS sensor for DSC and camcorder applications. The sensor features 35fps speed at full resolution or 60fps in 4K2K mode.

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