Archives for March 2019

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Silicon Valley Business Journal publishes few photos from Velodyne manufacturing line showing quite complex and labor intensive calibration procedures. The rumor is that the high-end Velodyne LiDARs require about 90 hours of calibration and alignment during and after the assembly. Assuming a technician labor cost of about $50 per hour (am I correct? is this a typical number for Silicon Valley?), it sets a floor for the unit price at about $4,500.

However, it appears that Velodyne CEO disagrees with me:

Velodyne "opened its San Jose "megafactory" in 2017 and now employs about 400 there. Founder David Hall said he plans to make his products there for the foreseeable future.

"Most of the cost of our lidars are in the parts themselves and not the labor to assemble them," he said. "San Jose has a large and available skilled labor force that, while not price competitive with anywhere in Asia, does a higher quality job than we would get by assembling the units elsewhere."

Velodyne LiDAR puck is mounted on robotic arm for testing

Velodyne employees work on laser and detector alignment for VLS-128 LiDARs

Optical and mechanical accuracy checks for every components

Update: Silicon Valley Business Journal publishea another article about Velodyne "Velodyne LiDAR, the inventor: ‘We aren’t a one-trick pony’" - can be seen on mobile phone.

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Cell journal publishes a paper "Mammalian Near-Infrared Image Vision through Injectable and Self-Powered Retinal Nanoantennae" by Yuqian Ma, Jin Bao, Yuanwei Zhang, Zhanjun Li, Xiangyu Zhou, Changlin Wan, Ling Huang, Yang Zhao, Gang Han, and Tian Xue from University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and University of Massachusetts.

"Mammals cannot see light over 700 nm in wavelength. This limitation is due to the physical thermodynamic properties of the photon-detecting opsins. However, the detection of naturally invisible near-infrared (NIR) light is a desirable ability. To break this limitation, we developed ocular injectable photoreceptor-binding upconversion nanoparticles (pbUCNPs). These nanoparticles anchored on retinal photoreceptors as miniature NIR light transducers to create NIR light image vision with negligible side effects. Based on single-photoreceptor recordings, electroretinograms, cortical recordings, and visual behavioral tests, we demonstrated that mice with these nanoantennae could not only perceive NIR light, but also see NIR light patterns. Excitingly, the injected mice were also able to differentiate sophisticated NIR shape patterns. Moreover, the NIR light pattern vision was ambient-daylight compatible and existed in parallel with native daylight vision. This new method will provide unmatched opportunities for a wide variety of emerging bio-integrated nanodevice designs and applications."


Unfortunately, the upconversion photon efficiency is quite low, between 1e-5 and 1e-6 depending on the 980nm source power:


The researchers publish a video explaining their paper in a plain language:

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Techinsights publishes "Image Sensor Subscription: Example Content" presentation with many interesting slides:

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L-Rumors quotes Sigma CEO Kazuto Yamaki saying that the new full frame Foveon sensor will be manufactures by TSI Semiconductors foundry in Roseville, CA:

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Techinsights publishes a teardown report of just announced Samsung flagship phone Galaxy S10+. The cost of 3 rear cameras and 2 front cameras of the smartphone is estimated at $56.5 out of the total BOM of $420:

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Arxiv.org publishes University of Wisconsin-Madison 27-page long paper "High Flux Passive Imaging with Single-Photon Sensors" by Atul Ingle, Andreas Velten, and Mohit Gupta.

"We propose passive free-running SPAD (PF-SPAD) imaging, an imaging modality that uses SPADs for capturing 2D intensity images with unprecedented dynamic range under ambient lighting, without any active light source. Our key observation is that the precise inter-photon timing measured by a SPAD can be used for estimating scene brightness under ambient lighting conditions, even for very bright scenes. We develop a theoretical model for PF-SPAD imaging, and derive a scene brightness estimator based on the average time of darkness between successive photons detected by a PF-SPAD pixel. Our key insight is that due to the stochastic nature of photon arrivals, this estimator does not suffer from a hard saturation limit. Coupled with high sensitivity at low flux, this enables a PF-SPAD pixel to measure a wide range of scene brightness, from very low to very high, thereby achieving extreme dynamic range. We demonstrate an improvement of over 2 orders of magnitude over conventional sensors by imaging scenes spanning a dynamic range of 10^6:1."

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PRNewswire: SmartSens has presented a research paper, "A Stacked Global-Shutter CMOS Imager with SC-Type Hybrid-GS Pixel and Self-Knee Point Calibration Single-Frame HDR and On-Chip Binarization Algorithm for Smart Vision Applications," at ISSCC 2019 in San Francisco. SmartSens CEO Richard Xu was the first presenter in the ISSCC's image sensor technology session which attracted over 200 attendees from leading organizations from the industry and academia.

Known as the "integrated circuit Olympics," ISSCC is said to be one of the most important global forums in the IC industry. "We are proud to be selected to present our paper at ISSCC. It's a tremendous honor for SmartSens as the committee recognizes our achievements in the field of CMOS image sensors," said Xu. "Behind this success is our commitment to developing cutting-edge image sensing technology and products for the emerging applications in the era of 5G, AI and machine vision."

In this paper, SmartSens unveils a new BSI global shutter sensor that has performance advantages such as high sensitivity, low noise, high shutter efficiency, HDR with improved PRNU performance and self-knee point calibration. The sensor integrates an ISP using stacked technology. The new sensor is said to be most suitable for smart vision applications, such as face identification, machine vision, 3D imaging and AI.

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