Archives for August 2019

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Autosens publishes more video presentations from its latest Detroit conference in May 2019.

Sony's Solution Architect Tsuyoshi Hara presents "The influence of colour filter pattern and its arrangement on resolution and colour reproducibility:"



Valeo's Patrick Denny presents "Addressing LED flicker:"



GEO Semiconductor's Director of Imaging R&D Manjunath Somayaji presents "Tuning ISP for automotive use:"



ARM Senior Manager of Image Quality Alexis Lluis Gomez presents "ISP optimization for ML/CV automotive applications:"

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Autosens publishes Omnivision CTO Boyd Fowler presentation "RGB-IR Sensors for In-Cabin Automotive Applications."



Another Autosens video by Robin Jenkin, Principal Image Quality Engineer, NVIDIA updates on P2020 standard progress.

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Gizmochina: Huawei presents a prototype of IR camera-based fingerprint sensor under LCD display. Most of other under-display sensors work with OLED displays. The demo posted on Twitter says:

"This is an LCD screen fingerprint technology based on the infrared camera solution, which can basically ignore the LCD panel type and unlock the speed for 300ms."

#Huawei
This is an LCD screen fingerprint technology based on the infrared camera solution, which can basically ignore the LCD panel type and unlock the speed for 300ms. pic.twitter.com/gDb61I7GIt

— Xiaomishka (@xiaomishka) August 11, 2019

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BusinessWire: Samsung introduces 108MP ISOCELL Bright HMX, the first mobile image sensor in the mobile CIS industry to go beyond 100MP. The new 1/1.33-inch sensor uses the same 0.8μm pixel from the recently announced 64MP. The ISOCELL Bright HMX is the result of close collaboration between Xiaomi and Samsung.

The pixel-merging Tetracell technology allows the sensor to imitate big-pixel sensors, producing brighter 27MP images. In bright environments, the Smart-ISO, a mechanism that intelligently selects the level of amplifier gains according to the illumination of the environment for optimal light-to-electric signal conversion, switches to a low ISO to improve pixel saturation and produce vivid photographs. The mechanism uses a high ISO in darker settings that helps reduce noise, resulting in clearer pictures. The HMX supports video recording without losses in field-of-view at resolutions up to 6K (6016 x 3384) 30fps.

“For ISOCELL Bright HMX, Xiaomi and Samsung have worked closely together from the early conceptual stage to production that has resulted in a groundbreaking 108Mp image sensor. We are very pleased that picture resolutions previously available only in a few top-tier DSLR cameras can now be designed into smartphones,” said Lin Bin, co-founder and president of Xiaomi. “As we continue our partnership, we anticipate bringing not only new mobile camera experiences but also a platform through which our users can create unique content.”

“Samsung is continuously pushing for innovations in pixel and logic technologies to engineer our ISOCELL image sensors to capture the world as close to how our eyes perceive them,” said Yongin Park, EVP of sensor business at Samsung. “Through close collaboration with Xiaomi, ISOCELL Bright HMX is the first mobile image sensor to pack over 100 million pixels and delivers unparalleled color reproduction and stunning detail with advanced Tetracell and ISOCELL Plus technology.”

Mass production of Samsung ISOCELL Bright HMX will begin later this month.

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GlobeNewsWire: Himax Q2 2019 earnings report updates on the company's 3D sensing projects:

"Himax continues to participate in most of the smartphone OEMs’ ongoing 3D sensing projects covering structured light and time-of-flight (ToF). As the Company reported earlier, in the past, its structured light-based 3D sensing total solution targeting Android smartphone’s front-facing application was unsuccessful due to high hardware cost, long development lead time, and the lack of killer applications. Since then, the Company has adjusted its structured light-based 3D sensing technology development to focus on applications for non-smartphone segments which are typically less sensitive to cost and always require a total solution. The Company teamed up with industry-leading facial recognition algorithm and application processor partners to develop new 3D sensing applications for smart door lock and have started design-in projects with certain end customers. Separately the Company is collaborating with partners who wish to take advantage of its 3D sensing know-how to automate traditional manufacturing and thereby improve its efficiency and cost. A prototype of the cutting-edge manufacturing line is being built on Himax’s premises and it believes this project can represent a major step forward in its alternative 3D sensing applications. Himax is still in the early stage of exploring the full business potential for structured light 3D sensing technology but believe it will be applicable in a wide range of industries, particularly those demanding high level of depth accuracy.

On ToF 3D sensing, the Company has seen increasing adoption of world-facing solutions to enable advanced photography, distance/dimension measurement and 3D depth information generation for AR applications. Very recently, thanks to ToF sensor technology advancement, some OEMs are also exploring ToF 3D for front-facing facial recognition and payment certification. As a technology leader in the 3D sensing space, Himax is an active participant in smartphone OEMs’ design projects for new devices involving ToF technology by offering WLO optics and/or transmitter modules with its unique eye-safety protection design."

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NextWeb, DPReview: At a briefing in China, Xiaomi announces it is to become the first manufacturer to use Samsung’s new 108MP ISOCELL sensor. The maximum resolution of that sensor will be 12,032 x 9,024 pixels:


Thanks to TS for the pointer!

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IFNews: IHS Markit reports that multi-camera smartphones and ToF solutions adoption benefits most image sensor manufacturers but in different degree. Hynix CIS sales are forecasted to jump 10x from 2018 to 2020, while other companies are expected to grow by 20-50%:


Under-display selfie cameras is in development by major smartphone camera makers. However, the technology needs more time to solve the issues of display transparency and uniformity in the camera area:


Meanwhile, TF Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo forecasts a large growth of under-display fingerprint sensors in smartphones:

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Yantai, China-based IRay unveils its 10um pixel microbolometers, said to be the first in China. The first product has 1280 x 1024 resolution and features:

• Vanadium oxide pixels
• Integrated 14b ADC
• 30fps speed
• Better than 40mK NETD
• Small pixel optics and algorithms

Thanks to YN for the pointer!

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Quanergy publishes a video explanation of its LiDAR approach:



Ouster article "The Dead Bug Problem" emphasize the importance of larger lens:

"...lidar sensors with smaller optical apertures are less resilient to obscurants. Opaque or refractive obscurants, like a raindrop, can deflect laser light, attenuate the lidar signal and thereby reduce range in that pixel. With larger beam aperture, signal strength is only partially attenuated instead of completely blocked, and the point cloud would show minimal impact."


University of Michigan and University of California, Irvine project "Adversarial Sensor Attack on LiDAR-based AV Perception" claims to find a way to fool Baidu Apollo AI-based autonomous driving platform into perceiving an obstacles in close distances to the front of a victim AV:

"In this work, we perform the first security study of LiDAR-based perception in AV systems. We consider LiDAR spoofing attacks as the threat model, and set the attack goal as spoofing front-near obstacles. We first reproduce the state-of-the-art LiDAR spoofing attack, and find that blindly applying it is insufficient to achieve the attack goal due to the machine learning-based object detection process. We thus perform analysis to fool the machine learning model by formulating the attack task as an optimization problem. We first construct the input perturbation function using local attack experiments and global spatial transformation-based modeling, and then construct the objective function by studying the post-processing process. We also identify the inherent limitations of directly using optimization-based methods and design a new algorithm that increases the attack success rates by 2.65× on average. As a case study, we further construct and evaluate two attack scenarios that may compromise AV safety and mobility. We also discuss defense directions at AV system, sensor, and machine learning model levels."

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ON Semi Q2 2019 earnings call updates on its image sensor business:

"In ADAS applications, our momentum continues to accelerate. We are seeing strong interest from customers in our broad portfolio of automotive image sensor products. Recall that we are the only provider of automotive image sensors with complete portfolio of 1 megapixel, 2 megapixel and 8 megapixel image sensors. The breadth of our portfolio has enabled us to secure many design wins from leading global OEMs and tier-1s."

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TSMC publishes its LiDAR and HDR sensing automotive portfolio mentioning 1550nm NIR+ Gen2 imaging platform:

"TSMC's pixel-level stacking technology enables higher resolution, HDR and Global shutters that are imperatives in fully autonomous vehicles. Our high QE(Quantum Efficiency) NIR technology enhances vehicle night vision. NIR+ at visible wavelength and NIR+ Gen2 at longer wavelength are being added to the portfolio, to make 940nm/1550nm Lidar sensor feasible."

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Trinamix publishes some examples of 3D cameras based on its technology:

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Techinsights publishes part 4 of the state of the art of smartphone imagers review, the omitted part from Ray Fontaine's presentation at IISW 2019 in June "Non-Bayer CFA, Phase Detection Autofocus (PDAF)."

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PRNewswire: OMRON launches the Light Convergent Reflective Sensor "B5W-LB series" for industrial applications. The sensor uses OMRON's unique lens structure combining four types of aspherical lenses for stable detection with a wide sensing range regardless of colors and materials such as shiny, black, and transparent surface:

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Samsung Q2 2019 report has an interesting part that the company's CIS foundry business is growing. Also, Samsung high resolution smartphone sensors and large pixel sensors show the growth:


SeekingAlpha earnings call transcript gives few more details:

"In the second quarter, as Chinese smartphone continues to intensify the competition for the camera spec, demand for multiple cameras and higher resolution, big-pixel, image sensors increased more, and we have achieved solid results.

Noticeably, demand for high value-added products is also expected to continue to increase because customers still want to differentiate product by adopting the products such as 64 megapixel image sensors and EUV 7-nano, APs, et cetera.

Looking ahead, we plan to expand our lineup of our 5G chipset solutions and image sensors to address demand for the high specs in the smartphone market and we will also expand our mid to long-term business scope by diversifying our product offerings through the development of the 3D and FoD sensors and automotive IoT chips.

...in terms of revenue of our entire System LSI business, image sensors account for about one-third."

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