Archives for June 2019

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In the early 1970’s, soon after the invention of the CCD image sensor, there was great interest in low-light cameras using CCDs. At Westinghouse, Dr. Marvin White was working with the Navy on low-light CCDs. So-called kTC noise on the output node was limiting the low light performance. Marvin said he borrowed the general idea of double-sampling from radar signal processing at Westinghouse and applied it to CCD signal processing (see here, for example).

Since then Correlated Double Sampling (CDS) has been a mainstay in CCD signal processing to reduce noise and spawned the use of other noise-reduction strategies like DDS, CMS in both analog and digital domains. Probably every CCD made since the early 1970’s up through the present has employed CDS. For this pioneering achievement, the International Image Sensor Society (IISS), will be presenting Dr. White with the 2019 IISS Pioneering Achievement Award at the 2019 IISW at Snowbird later in June. Congratulations, and thank you, Marvin!

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DeviceSpecifications: Xiaomi SVP Wang Xiang explained how a smartphone selfie camera works from under display occupying the whole front surface:


Update: Chinese-language site IT Home publishes a demo of Xiaomi under-display camera:



Update #2: Mashable publishes a video on Xiaomi and Oppo demos of under-display camera:



Here is the official high quality Xiaomi video:

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ALA News: French Sofradir and its subsidiary ULIS announce their merger and a new company name: Lynred. Lynred will have a critical mass all-inclusive IR products to the global aerospace, defense, industrial and consumer markets. Its US entity remains a subsidiary and has been renamed Lynred USA.

Lynred's 1,000 employees will provide a range of advanced IR technologies, assure a long-term and reliable product supply, and accompany client projects with the IR design and equipment integration support.

“Lynred will enter the market with a new vision for the future in an increasingly competitive market, which has seen the number of players double over the last five years,” said Jean-François Delepau, chairman of Lynred. “We are the established European leader in infrared technologies. Now, Lynred gives us more punching weight in R&D and increased visibility within the IR ecosystem. Thanks to the commitment of our employees in forming Lynred and increased support from our partners, we will be able to offer new attractive solutions to our customers.”

The world military IR imaging systems market was estimated at $8.5b (approx. €7.6bn) in 2018 and is expected to grow to $14b (approx. €12.5bn) in 2023. Extrapolated market data also indicates that the market for cameras for industrial and consumer applications has the potential to increase from $2.9b (approx. €2.6bn) to $4.1b (€3.7bn) in the same period. This translates to a global potential annual market growth rate of around 10% at camera and system level.

Lynred will advance developments of next generation IR detectors with the €150M ($167.4M) financial investment it is making in the Nano2022 project over the next five years. These IR devices will be designed to address trends in autonomous systems for smart buildings (workspace management, energy savings), road safety and in-cabin comfort of vehicles.

Developments also include the very large dimension IR detectors needed for space and astronomy observations as well as compact and light IR detectors that can be used in portable devices and on drones.

"Our new brand name, Lynred, is inspired by the razor-sharp vision, feline agility, power, and performance embodied by the lynx. The Lynred logo evokes the precision, protection, trust, vision, and cooperative spirit that make our products and company unique. The stylized eye, historically present in our visual communications, marks continuity between our past and our exciting future," said Delepau.

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Forbes publishes an article "Meet The Company Behind The In-Display Fingerprint Sensors In OnePlus, Huawei, Vivo And Redmi Phones" talking about recent history of development of under-display optical fingerprint sensor, the market that has started from Synaptics but now controlled by China-based Goodix:

"Goodix wasn't the first to succeed in placing a fully functional fingerprint scanner underneath the display... After a year of fine-tuning, [Synaptics] Clear ID was officially unveiled in a Vivo prototype at the Consumer Electronics Show in January of 2018, helping Vivo grab an impressive share of headlines.

Soon after, Vivo switched over to Goodix's in-display solution for its next release, the Vivo Nex, and the improved performance was immediately noticeable.

Today, it'd be easier to name phones that don't use Goodix's in-display scanners, as Huawei, Xiaomi, Oppo, Meizu, Lenovo and OnePlus have all joined Vivo in using Goodix's scanner tech. This near monopoly of the market -- Samsung is the only brand using an in-display scanner that isn't made by Goodix -- has brought in significant revenue: Goodix made 3.8 billion yuan ($535.8 million) in revenue in 2018, of which 3 billion ($434.5 million) came from the fingerprint scanner business.

"We have 400 engineers, constantly working on our sensors from a hardware and software perspective," [Goodix's VP R&D, Carson] Ye says. "This includes fine-tuning algorithms, improving sensor light sensitivity, and things of that nature."


Here is another Goodix module taken out of the latest Xiaomi Redmi K20 phone:

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Infineon, Carinthian Tech Research, and Johannes Kepler University, Austria, publish MDPI paper "A CMOS Compatible Pyroelectric Mid-Infrared Detector Based on Aluminium Nitride" by Christian Ranacher, Cristina Consani, Andreas Tortschanoff, Lukas Rauter, Dominik Holzmann, Clement Fleury, Gerald Stocker, Andrea Fant, Herbert Schaunig, Peter Irsigler, Thomas Grille, and Bernhard Jakoby.

"In this work, we present a CMOS compatible pyroelectric detector which was devised as a mid-infrared detector, comprising aluminium nitride (AlN) as the pyroelectric material and fabricated using semiconductor mass fabrication processes. To ensure thermal decoupling of the detector, the detectors are realized on a Si3N4/SiO2 membrane. The detectors have been tested at a wavelength close to the CO2 absorption region in the mid-infrared. Devices with various detector and membrane sizes were fabricated and the influence of these dimensions on the performance was investigated. The noise equivalent power of the first demonstrator devices connected to a readout circuit was measured to be as low as 5.3×10e−9 W/sqrt(Hz)."

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As AT said in comments, there is another 11-min lecture by Makoto Ikeda from University of Tokyo: "Circuit Contributions to Performance of Imagers."

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IFNews publishes UBS Smartphone market report dated by May 22, 2019. According to UBS poll, interest to smartphone camera features and specs goes down, while FaceID interest goes up:

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IEEE Solid State Circuits Society has recently opened its Youtube channel with interesting explanatory videos on different topics. Makoto Ikeda from Tokyo University managed to squeeze an amazing amount of info in just over 11min video about image sensors:

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DPReview posts Google video about its multi-frame super-resolution algorithm explained in 3min:

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Engadget quotes Wall Street Journal saying that 3D camera maker Leap Motion has been quietly acquired by one of its customers UltaHaptics. It was said to be valued at 10x as much in 2013. Reportedly, Apple twice tried to buy Leap Motion, with its second attempt being as recent as in 2018. The acquisition has been officially reported in Leap Motion Blog.

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