Archives for August 2016

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Nikkei reports that Canon will supply image sensors to other manufacturers for the first time, anticipating demand for the technology in building self-driving cars, robots and other smart devices. The plan is to start sell sensors within two years. The company has already assembled a team to launch the business.

Canon manufactures its image senors at two plants in Kanagawa Prefecture near Tokyo and one in southern Japan's Oita Prefecture. So far, all the capacity is used in the company's digital cameras and some video cameras. With the camera market shrinking, Canon aims to offset a decline in sensor output.

Not to clash with Sony and others already holding substantial shares of the market for general-purpose CMOS sensors, Canon intends to supply specialized devices for automotive and industrial applications. Besides cars and robots, it envisions its sensors helping guide drones, as well as sharpening the vision of traffic-monitoring systems. However, other image sensor manufacturers are also pursuing automotive and industrial applications.

Canon's in-house supply of CMOS sensors ranks fifth in the world in terms of value, with a roughly 5% market share, according to Tokyo-based TSR. Sony leads the market, with a 40%-plus share, followed by Samsung Electronics at nearly 20%.

Canon is working on Super Machine Vision (SMV), a next-generation vision system that surpasses the abilities of the human vision system, by leveraging its dual-pixel AF from cameras and business machines while also taking advantage of the image-recognition and data-processing capabilities employed in face-detection and character-recognition technologies.

In an unrelated news, Canon develops a global shutter CMOS sensor that achieves expanded DR through new drive method. When the newly developed CMOS sensor converts light into electrical signals and stores the signal charge in memory, the new drive system is said to achieve a significant expansion in full well capacity. Also, because it employs a structure that efficiently captures light and each pixel incorporates an optimized internal configuration, the sensor makes possible increased sensitivity with reduced noise. The expanded full well capacity, realized through the sensor’s new drive system, and substantial reduction in noise, enabled by the new pixel structure, combine to deliver a wide dynamic range, facilitating the capture of high-image-quality, high-definition footage even when shooting scenes containing large variances in brightness.

Canon will explore various industrial and measurement applications for the newly developed CMOS sensor and consider deploying it in the field of video production for cinema production applications, TV dramas, commercials and more.

Canon GS WDR sensor prototype

Update: The GS WDR sensor announcement appear to be Canon marketing answer on the critics of its new full-frame 5D IV DSLR. DPReview, among other sites, says that the rolling shutter artifacts are quite significant and the DR is noticeably lower than the competing full-format cameras.

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Digitimes reports that the demand for iris and face recognition processors for smartphones is to surge, according to the newspaper's industry sources.

Pixart is expected to be among the first China and Taiwan-based players capable of rolling out related solutions. Pixart has already submitted iris recognition and eye tracking patent applications in the US, said the sources, and is set to launch related solutions as early as 2017.

Another Digitimes article says that Xintec is to start fulfilling orders for iris-recognition solutions in Q4 2016, according to a Chinese-language MoneyDJ.com report. The mass production of the iris-recognition chips is expected in 2017, which will boost the backend house's revenues for the year. New orders for the iris-recognition sensors include those for the 2017 model of iPhone, the watchers were also quoted in the report.

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Innsbruck University, Austria publishes BSc thesis "Developing a Low-Cost Augmented Reality System" by Carsten Fischer, talking about camera design issues, among other stuff:

"The goal of this document is to give the reader a better understanding of the underlying theory of augmented reality systems and which adaptations can decrease the cost of such systems, while maintaining a good experience. The requirements on the including hardware parts will be explained, before summarizing the manufacturing process and highlighting features of the including software. Finally the system will be evaluated, by conducting a user study on depth perception."

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Ex-CDM Optics (Omnivision) employees have started FiveFocal company offering Imager, a camera simulator software. The image sensor pixel model is fairly basic, making it simple enough for general public to use and understand:



The company also has a very nice blog covering different camera and optics design topics, such as camera optimizations for vision algorithms:

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SMPTE announces its 2016 Honors & Awards Recipients. The David Sarnoff Medal Award recognizes outstanding contributions to the development of new techniques or equipment that have improved the engineering phases of television technology, including large-venue presentations. The award will be presented to Peter G.M. Centen (Grass Valley VP R&D, Cameras) in recognition of his work in image sensors, imaging, and broadcast camera innovation. Centen has been at the forefront of the CCD and CMOS sensor technology, and in 2003 he was awarded an Emmy for the development of high-definition dynamic pixel management (HD-DPM) for CCD sensors.

Below is Peter Centen's HPA 2015 presentation on 4K HDR image sensors:

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Yole Developpement publishes an interview with Cyrille Trouilleau, Product Manager at ULIS. Few quotes:

"ULIS, a subsidiary of Sofradir, specializes in designing and manufacturing innovative thermal image sensors for commercial and defense applications... Founded in 2002, ULIS has grown to become the second largest producer of thermal image sensors (microbolometers)... ULIS is active in the surveillance, thermography, defense and outdoor leisure markets where we already sold more 500,000 thermal sensors worldwide.

...ULIS experienced strong growth in 2015, with close to a 20% increase in volume sales over 2014. Not due to exceptional event, growth we saw is supported by an increase of the demand coming from all the markets; 2016 signs remain as so positive and we expect to reach at least the same growth."

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Systemplus publishes a reverse engineering report on the dual camera module extracted from Huawei P9 smartphone:

"The P9 camera module, with dimensions of 18 x 9.2 x 5.1mm, is equipped with two sub-modules each including a Sony CIS, a closed loop voice coil motor (VCM) and a 6-element lens. Doubling the number of cameras gives more light, vivid colors and crisper details. Moreover, it compensates for the fact that the module is provided without optical image stabilization (OIS). The CISs are assembled on a copper metal core 4-layer PCB using a wire bonding process. An external image processor chip is present on the phone’s printed circuit board (PCB)."


Another Systemplus report talks about I3system's Thermal Expert camera for smartphones:

"The thermal camera uses a new 17µm pixel design from I3system. The I3BOL384_17A microbolometer features 384 x 288 pixel resolution, 6 times the resolution of the FLIR Lepton 3. The sensor technology in the I3system component is a titanium oxide microbolometer, technology which is not covered by Honeywell patents. The I3BOL384_17A is the consumer version of a military microbolometer."

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FoxNews: US startup Nutonomy managed to beat Uber starting its autonomous taxi trial in Singapore. Currently, their autonomous fleet has just 6 Mitsubishi i-MiEv electric cars, with the planned full launch of the service in 2018.



Meanwhile, Electronics Weekly published the details on Uber's acquisition of Otto, a startup retrofitting tracks with self-driving equipment. The 6-month old startup based in a garage south of Market Street in San Francisco was acquired for $680M plus 20% of any profits it makes from trucking. Otto has retrofitted five trucks so far.

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Yole Developpement publishes report "Uncooled IR imaging industry: the market is taking off." Few quotes:

After a strong downturn in 2012 and 2013 due to the collapse of the military market, the uncooled IR imaging industry came back into a growth phase in 2014 and 2015. Today, the infrared business is still driven by commercial markets, which will continue to expand quickly, with shipments growing at 16.8% CAGR to account for 92% of the overall market by 2021. The commercial market is divided into three major sub-segments:

• Thermography, which will account for 521,000 units in 2021. In 2015, thermography was still by far the main commercial market in terms of both value and shipments. “Since 2013, Fluke and FLIR have introduced several new products with lower pricing, which has boosted sales,” comments Dr Mounier. The trend towards lower-end thermography cameras has also prompted the introduction of low-resolution technologies such as pyroelectric sensors, thermopiles, and thermodiodes.
• From its side, the automotive market segment will account for 284,000 units by 2021, according to Yole’s analysts. Automotive market shipments grew 15% in 2015, although the growth rate was down from 30% in 2014. Total automotive sales, including OEM and aftermarket, accounted for less than 100,000 units in 2015, generating US$61 million, which reflects strong price erosion.
• Ultimately, surveillance and security applications will account for 248,000 units in 2021. Surveillance market shipments grew 32% in 2015 due to price erosion and the growing number of suppliers.

Until recently, thermal cameras have primarily been used in high-end surveillance for critical and government infrastructure. However, new municipal and commercial applications with lower price points are now appearing, including traffic, parking, power stations and photovoltaic plants.

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Open-access Sensors journal publishes a paper "Towards a Graphene-Based Low Intensity Photon Counting Photodetector" by Jamie O. D. Williams, Jack A. Alexander-Webber, Jon S. Lapington, Mervyn Roy, Ian B. Hutchinson, Abhay A. Sagade, Marie-Blandine Martin, Philipp Braeuninger-Weimer, Andrea Cabrero-Vilatela, Ruizhi Wang, Andrea De Luca, Florin Udrea, and Stephan Hofmann from University of Leicester and University of Cambridge, UK. The paper reviews graphene photodetecting approaches for visible, Terahertz and X-ray bands.


"The future applications of single photon counting photodetectors requires high detection efficiency with wavelength specificity, good temporal resolution and low dark counts. Graphene’s high mobility, tunable band gap (in bilayer graphene), strong dependence of conductivity on electric field, and other properties make it particularly suitable for this application. Here graphene acts as an (indirect) photoconductor with a high gain of transconductance due to the sharp field."

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EETimes: Microsoft says that HoloLens processing unit (HPU) fuses input from five cameras, a depth sensor and motion sensor, compacting and sending it to the Intel SoC. It also recognizes gestures and maps environments including multiple rooms. The TSMC 28nm HPU packs 24 Tensilica DSP cores and 8MB cache into a 12x12mm package with 65M transistors. A GByte of LPDDR3 is included in the HPU’s package.

HPU die

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SeekingAlpha transcript on Mobileye and Delphi partnership announcement has a statement that the two companies invest significant funds to develop self-driving car technology:

"When you think about what is needed to bring the Level 4/5 autonomy to series production, there is sensing – interpreting sensing on one hand, building an environmental model where all the moving objects and obstacles and all the path and symmetric meaning, but there is another component to it, which is being able to merge into traffic in a way that mimics human driving behavior. And there is machine intelligence to be ported into this. And there is a synergy between Delphi’s core IT in that area and Mobileye's core IT in that area and together we can bring a new class of machine intelligence into this project.

...as you can imagine just given the level of technology required and the amount of integration, on a combined basis [our investment] is hundreds of millions of dollars."

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GlobeNewsWire: TowerJazz and TowerJazz Panasonic Semiconductor Co. (TPSCo) announce a new state of the art CIS process based on stacked deep PD, allowing customers to achieve very high NIR sensitivity and realize extremely low cross-talk while keeping low dark current characteristics, using small pixels and high resolution.

This solution targets 3D gesture recognition and gesture control for the consumer, security, automotive and industrial sensors markets. NIR is becoming more and more popular in 3D gesture recognition applications and in automotive active vision applications for better visibility in harsh weather conditions. These ToF applications are using a NIR light source and ToF, creating a 3D image.

Current solutions generally use a thick epi on p-type substrate to achieve high sensitivity, but this creates high cross talk (low resolution) and high dark current values. The novel pixel structure developed by TowerJazz and TPSCo has a stacked deep photodiode, providing both high sensitivity and low cross talk at NIR. This allows very low dark current values, especially at elevated temperatures, required in the automotive market.

“The tremendously fast growth of 3D gesture application in the consumer market such as PC and mobile as well as in the automotive area will allow us to attract many customers with this technology that is the best the market has to offer,” said Avi Strum, SVP and GM, CMOS Image Sensor Business Unit, TowerJazz.

The process was developed on TPSCo’s 65nm CIS technology on 300mm wafers in its Uozu, Japan fab and is already in production for leading edge automotive and security sensors. It will also be available for new designs in TPSCo’s 110nm fab in Arai, Japan and in TowerJazz’s 180nm fab in Migdal Haemek, Israel.

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Agenda of 2016 Harvest Imaging Forum has been published. The Forum is devoted to "Robustness of CMOS Technology and Circuitry outside the Imaging Core : integrity, variability, reliability." The 2016 Harvest Imaging forum is split into two parts, divided over two days:

1. As all CMOS robustness topics are related to the basic CMOS devices and their operation, an in-depth knowledge of the most important fundamentals of CMOS physics, CMOS device and circuit operation, fabrication and design are necessary to ease the understanding of the robustness topics. For that reason time the first part of the forum will concentrate on the topics that have to do with CMOS physics, devices, circuits, fabrication and design, such as:
   
   CMOS device physics including the basic MOS device operation of nMOS and pMOS transistors, transistor current expression, the MOS diode and the MOS capacitor, the temperature dependence of the devices, the effect of the continuous scaling of CMOS technology and its problems, such as mobility reductions and leakage mechanisms,
   
   CMOS process technology including the basic CMOS process flow, advanced planar and FinFET technologies,
   
   CMOS circuit design, including basic logic gates, cell libraries, design flow and terminology.
   
   
2. The robustness of advanced CMOS integrated circuits. The second part of the forum includes a lot of CMOS problems that can show up as artefacts in the final captured image. Most of the imaging engineers are familiar with the effects on a display or hard-copy, but what can be root cause of the image quality problems? Topics that will be discussed in the forum are:
   
   Signal integrity issues such as cross-talk, signal propagation, interference between ICs, current peaks, supply noise, substrate and ground bounce, on-chip decoupling capacitors and design consequences,
   
   Variability issues including difference between random variations and systematic variations, causes of process parameter spread, proximity effects, random dopant fluctuations, transistor matching and design consequences
   
   Reliability issues and topics such as electro-migration, latch-up, hot-carrier effects, NBTI, soft-errors (by cosmic rays and alpha-particles), electro-static discharge, etc.

The 2016 Harvest Imaging Forum will include a copy of: “Nanometer CMOS ICs, from Basics to ASICs” (Springer 2016) and “Bits on Chips” (Springer, 2016), as well as a hard copy of all sheets presented.

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China-based surveillance camera maker Hikvision secures a credit facility of RMB ¥20b (more than USD $3b) with Export-Import Bank of China. In November 2015, Hikvision secured another USD $3b line of credit with China Development Bank.

So large credit lines from China state-owned banks reportedly raise some concerns in the industry that Hikvision gets an unfair advantage over its competitors.

The company's 2015 revenues were USD $3.88b, representing a YoY growth rate of 47%. Hikvision also has liquid funds available in the amount of RMB ¥11.8b (more than USD $1.78b). Hikvision is the world’s largest provider of video surveillance products and solutions for the fifth consecutive year, and the No. 1 global provider of IP cameras, according to IHS Research.

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Tokyo University Ishikawa Watanabe Lab publishes a couple of Youtube video exploring high speed image sensor applications. "High-speed 3D Sensing with Three-view Geometry Using a Segmented Pattern" demos 1000fps 3D camera:



"High-Speed Image Rotator for Blur-Canceling Roll Camera" demos rotation-compensating camera:

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e2v publishes a Youtube video showing night vision capabilities of its NIR 1.3MP Onyx sensor with 10um pixels:

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Canon patent application US20160233259 "Solid state image sensor, method of manufacturing solid state image sensor, and image capturing system" by Yasuhiro Sekine proposes a "teardrop" shaped microlens in order to reduce lens shading on the periphery of the pixel array:

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Bloomberg, IEEE Spectrum: Starting later this month, Uber will allow customers in downtown Pittsburgh to summon self-driving cars from their phones, crossing an important milestone that no automotive or technology company has yet achieved.

“The minute it was clear to us that our friends in [Google] Mountain View were going to be getting in the ride-sharing space, we needed to make sure there is an alternative [self-driving car],” says Uber CEO Travis Kalanick. “Because if there is not, we’re not going to have any business.” Developing an autonomous vehicle, he adds, “is basically existential for us.”

Uber’s modified Volvo XC90 SUV.

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Ford announces the steps to mass produce a fully autonomous driving car in 2021. To get there, the company is investing in or collaborating with four startups to enhance its autonomous vehicle development, doubling its Silicon Valley team and more than doubling its Palo Alto campus.

On the imaging side, Ford announcing four key investments and collaborations in advanced algorithms, 3D mapping, LiDAR, and radar and camera sensors:

• Velodyne: Ford has invested in Velodyne, the Silicon Valley-based company dealing with light detection and ranging (LiDAR) sensors. The aim is to quickly mass-produce a more affordable automotive LiDAR sensor. Ford has a longstanding relationship with Velodyne, and was among the first to use LiDAR for both high-resolution mapping and autonomous driving beginning more than 10 years ago
• SAIPS: Ford has acquired the Israel-based computer vision and machine learning company to further strengthen its expertise in artificial intelligence and enhance computer vision. SAIPS has developed algorithmic solutions in image and video processing, deep learning, signal processing and classification. This expertise will help Ford autonomous vehicles learn and adapt to the surroundings of their environment
• Nirenberg Neuroscience LLC: Ford has an exclusive licensing agreement with Nirenberg Neuroscience, a machine vision company founded by neuroscientist Dr. Sheila Nirenberg, who cracked the neural code the eye uses to transmit visual information to the brain. This has led to a powerful machine vision platform for performing navigation, object recognition, facial recognition and other functions, with many potential applications. For example, it is already being applied by Dr. Nirenberg to develop a device for restoring sight to patients with degenerative diseases of the retina. Ford’s partnership with Nirenberg Neuroscience will help bring humanlike intelligence to the machine learning modules of its autonomous vehicle virtual driver system
• Civil Maps: Ford has invested in Berkeley, California-based Civil Maps to further develop high-resolution 3D mapping capabilities. Civil Maps has pioneered an innovative 3D mapping technique that is scalable and more efficient than existing processes. This provides Ford another way to develop high-resolution 3D maps of autonomous vehicle environments

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VentureBeat has had a chance to get a closer look at Intel Project Allow headset and publishes a clear picture of its two RealSense cameras at the front. The headset is said to be controlled by hand gestures:

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PRNewswire: CEVA announces that Novatek, Taiwan's 2nd largest fabless IC design house, has licensed and deployed the CEVA-XM4 intelligent vision DSP for its next-generation vision-enabled SoCs targeting a range of end markets requiring advanced visual intelligence capabilities. Novatek's current camera SoC lineup for car DVR and surveillance systems integrates the 3rd generation CEVA-MM3101 imaging & vision DSP and is shipping in volume.

By integrating CEVA-XM4 as a dedicated vision processor in their next-generation SoC designs, Novatek deploys vision algorithms to enable advanced applications such as surveillance systems with face detection and authentication, drone anti-collision systems and ADAS. These types of applications are built utilizing CEVA's Deep Neural Network (CDNN2), a proprietary framework that enables deep learning tasks to run on the CEVA-XM4 and is said to outperform any GPU or CPU-based system in terms of speed, power consumption and memory bandwidth requirements.

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Intel publishes highlights of RealSense camera technology features in its CEO Brian Krzanich presentation. Among other stuff, it features the company Project Alloy "merged reality" headset with embedded RealSense 3D camera. Project Alloy will be offered as an open platform in 2017.

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Intel announces the next-generation RealSense 400 3D camera offering improved accuracy with more than double the number of 3D points captured per second and more than double the operating range compared with the previous generation. Coupled with support for indoor and outdoor uses, RealSense 400 will enable developers to create new applications.

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ArcticStartup: Norway’s poLight raises $20M at valuation of $74M. The company has raised a total of $60.4M, and it aims to go public in the near future. “poLight aims to complete an IPO within one year,” the company said.

“Over the past 18 months, poLight has been able to significantly mature its technology and have brought a commercial breakthrough for the company’s autofocus lens closer,” the company said. In cooperation with STMicro and THEIL, the company’s assembly partner in Taiwan, the production of the first product, TLens Silver, has been qualified.

“The priorities going forward will be to ramp up production and secure the first customer. poLight is in dialog with several potential customers, and several processes to qualify the company’s technology are ongoing,” the firm said.

TLens Silver Spec @ 25C

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ResearchInChina releases "Global and China Automotive Night Vision System Industry Report, 2016-2020." Few quotes:

"Night vision system can solve the vision problem in night driving and thus is the first to be used in Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Audi, as well as other luxury cars such as Rolls-Royce Ghost/Wraith, Cadillac CT6, Lexus LS/GS and Maybach S Class. As the core part detector is costly, night vision system hasn't been popularized yet. According to the survey, in 2016, the penetration rate of global automotive night vision system is only 0.47%, of which, Mercedes-Benz, Audi and BMW boast the highest assembly volume, Autoliv serves as the uppermost system provider, and FLIR is the primary supplier of thermal infrared imagers.

Global automotive night vision system suppliers are mainly Autoliv, Delphi, Bosch, Valeo and Visteon. Autoliv as the biggest one serves primarily Audi and BMW and accounts for roughly 60% of the market share. In 2016, Autoliv has launched the third-generation night vision solutions, which is said to be the world’s first night vision system that can detect traffic danger and living things in total darkness or fog.

In the future, with the growth of ADAS market, night vision system will usher in new development opportunities, resulting in fast-growing demand but also a change in product form e.g. fusion as a function of driving safety assistance system, integration with HUD and intelligent headlamp. Besides, whether active or passive night vision systems the technical defects haven’t been effectively improved, without ruling out the possibility of being replaced by other technologies such as millimeter-wave radar and camera in years to come."

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A 1965 film shows how high speed cameras were implemented and used at that time. To my surprise, they were able to achieve 1ns exposure time and speeds of millions fps in the purely mechanical systems:

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CNET: Samsung has adapted IBM's TrueNorth 4,096-core processor into its Dynamic Vision Sensor that processes video imagery quite differently than traditional digital cameras. "Each pixel operates independently and pipes up only if it needs to report a change in what it's seeing," said Eric Ryu, a VP of research at the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology. The camera is able to track objects at 2,000fps speed while consuming 300mW power.

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