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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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MEMS and Imaging Summit to be held in Grenoble, France on Sept. 25-27, 2019 publishes a part of its interesting agenda:

• Considerations of Optical Fingerprint and 3D Face Recognition Sensors for Cellular Security Applications, Avi Strum, SVP, TowerJazz
• Sensors in Mixed Reality, Sunil Acharya, Senior Director of Sensor Development Hololens, Microsoft
• A Touch of Finnish Sense, Antti Vasara, President & CEO, VTT
• Discovering New Dimensions: Our Vision to Sense the World, Christian Herzum, Senior Director 3D-Sensing & Discretes, Infineon Technologies
• 7.2um Pixel Event-Based Vision Sensor with Frame Readout, Raphael Berner, Head of chip design, Insightness AG
• PIXCURVE: a Global Approach for Curved Optical Components, David Henry, Head of Packaging and Assembly Laboratory, Optics and Photonics Division,CEA-Leti
• Wafer Scale Image Sensors: New Developments and Technology Challenges for the X-ray Market, Thalis Anaxagoras, Founder, ISDI
• Industrial Atomic Layer Deposition for Image Sensors, Mikko Söderlund, Director, Technical Sales Europe, Beneq
• Excellence in Microlens Imprint Lithography and Wafer-Stacking, Reinhard Voelkel, CEO, SUSS MicroOptics SA
• AI Close to the Sensor: an Approach for Energy Efficient and Real Time AI, Bram Senave, Business Development Manager, Easics
• Organic Image Sensors for Fingerprint Acquisition in Smartphone Display and NIR Development for Hybrid CMOS Imager, Benjamin Bouthinon, Optics Manager, ISORG
• 3D Depth Sensing: Time-of-Flight Technology and Application, Morin Dehan, Technology Engineer, Sony Depthsensing Solutions
• Electrowetting Based Liquid Lenses – a Novel Technology that Improves Imaging Device Performance, Frederic Laune, Corning
• Hyperspectral Imaging for Wafer Inspection, Jan Makowski, CEO / CTO, LuxFlux

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GlobeNewsWore: LeddarTech announces that its patent infringement case against Phantom Intelligence was settled favorably in the Federal Court of Canada.

In December 2015 LeddarTech challenged Phantom Intelligence for the illegal use of its patented LiDAR sensing technology protected by Canadian Patent No. 2,710,212, entitled “Detection and Ranging Methods and Systems” and relating to systems and methods for acquiring an optical signal and converting it into a digital domain. The patent has been filed in 2007 and granted in 2014. It's said to be a core driver of LeddarTech’s IP and is being practiced in all of its LiDAR products for ADAS and autonomous driving (AD) applications. The settlement, the amount, terms and conditions of which are confidential, was agreed under a court-sponsored mediation process following which Phantom Intelligence became a customer of LeddarTech.

“LeddarTech is proud of its years of innovation as a pioneer in LiDAR technology for ADAS and AD,” stated Pierre Olivier, CTO at LeddarTech. “We have always been confident that we would be successful in the defense of our intellectual property, and we will continue to be vigilant in protecting it.”

LeddarTech patent portfolio consists of 72 patents: 52 granted and 20 pending. The company intends to continue monitoring market for possible infringements of its proprietary LiDAR technology.

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Sony reports quarterly results for the quarter ended June 30, 2019. Probably, as a response to the calls to spin-off its semiconductor business, Sony splits it between different divisions, so that there is no Semiconductor Solutions division anymore. Image sensors become a part of "Imaging & Sensing Solutions Segment." It's not immediately clear what are the other products in this new segment. I was unable to find any official statement on that. A European site "Sony Image Sensing Solutions" talks about industrial cameras with no mention of image sensors.


Update: Sony official earnings call transcript explains the name change. It sounds like a reply to the spin-off proposals:

• From this quarter, we have changed the name of the Semiconductors segment to Imaging & Sensing Solutions (“I&SS”).
• Now I will explain the background and reasoning behind the change in name of the segment.
• The portion of Semiconductors segment revenue that comes from image sensors has been increasing every year, is expected to be approximately 85% of the segment this fiscal year and is expected to increase even more going forward.
• Image sensors are hybrids between analog and digital semiconductors, and, in terms of technology and business model, differ from logic LSI and memory, which most people think of when they hear the word semiconductors.
• Compared with logic LSI and memory, which require frequent capacity upgrades to maintain competitiveness due to quickly evolving process miniaturization, image sensors do not require regular, large capital investments because products can be differentiated through improvements in functionality and the addition of new features without having to upgrade production capacity.
• Moreover, since the image sensors business is focused on custom products that are differentiated through features and functionality, and because we have expanded our customer base the last several years and obtained a large share of the market, we have established a business model that experiences less impact from fluctuations in the market known as the silicon cycle.
• Over the last 10 years, we have achieved an extremely high level of compound annual sales growth at 17%, primarily from smartphone applications, and we have made significant investments to increase capacity as a result. However, we expect the investment requirements of this business to decrease significantly as the acute increase in demand transitions to a milder growth trajectory.
• The strategy for future growth in the I&SS segment is to develop AI sensors which make our sensors more intelligent by combining artificial intelligence with the sensors themselves.
• Development of these sensors will require us to leverage not only the strength of the hardware technology in the I&SS segment, such as the stacking of sensors on logic and copper-to-copper connections, but also the AI technology and diverse application technology in other parts of Sony, so our efforts in this area will span the entire Sony Group.
• We think that AI and sensing will be used across a wide range of applications such as autonomous driving, IoT, games and immersive entertainment. As such, we think there is a possibility that image sensors will evolve from the hardware they are today to solutions and platforms as visual data and sensing information is processed in a sophisticated manner inside sensors.
• The image sensor business is important because it is one of the pillars of the growth strategy of the Sony Group. We changed the name of the segment this time to assist your understanding of the characteristics and future strategy of this business, which I just explained.


Also, Sony gives few more details on the CIS business:

• FY19 Q1 sales increased 14% year-on-year to 230.7 billion yen and operating income increased 20.4 billion yen to 49.5 billion yen, primarily due to a significant increase in image sensor sales for mobile devices.
• Demand for our image sensors continues to be strong and our market share of image sensors for mid-range and high-end models of major smartphone makers remains high, due to adoption of multiple sensors per camera and growing demand for high value-added sensors made using large die-sizes.
• We are currently utilizing 100% of our internal capacity.
• However, concerns about the impact of trade issues in the second half of the fiscal year remain. We have already been conservative when forecasting the impact of these issues, but, because we want to evaluate the risks over the course of the first half of the fiscal year, we have made no changes to our April forecast.

Update #2: Yahoo: “It surprised us that the image sensor business was really strong,” said Masahiro Wakasugi, an analyst with Bloomberg Intelligence. “We thought there might be a risk that Huawei could be cutting some orders. We think going forward the image sensor business will be one of the key contributors to positive sales and earnings results for Sony.”

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SeekingAlpha publishes a transcript of TowerJazz Q2 2016 earnings call. Few updates on image sensor business:

"Looking into our CMOS image sensor business, our largest application and market is the industrial market. As previously discussed, we have seen a pullback, which our customers attribute to the trade war. It is starting to pick up now with new projects, many of which are targeted towards large screen display inspection using very high resolution global shutter sensors. All of our new projects are based on our state-of-the-art global shutter pixels in our 65-nanometer, 12-inch line in Uozu. We expect these projects to ramp towards the end of next year. Orders for present products are forecast by customers to recover with wafer starts beginning during the fourth quarter of this year.

We have won a large face recognition sensor project for smartphones. It will be based on indirect time-of-flight technology and we'll use state-of-the-art stacking technology, utilizing our 300-millimeter, 65-nanometer platform. In parallel, for mobile applications, we are working with 3 leading fingerprint companies for under OLED and under LCD optical sensors, based upon our unique pixel technology. These projects are expected to begin to ramp in 2020, utilizing our well-established 0.18 micron, 200-millimeter CIS technology.

In the high-end photography area, we're moving along with the next-generation stacking sensor project, partnering with an undisputed leader in the market, targeted to ramp in 2021. Medical and dental x-ray demand has remained stable with strong margins. We see an increased demand for large CMOS-based panels. We're now in the final qualification stages of new products with one of the leading providers. Additionally, we are fully qualified and started to ship single-die wafer-scale medical x-ray sensors on 300-millimeter with 2 additional customers planning final product tapeout in the fourth quarter of this year.

...we have decided to accelerate our planned expansion and to allocate $100 million to increase the capacity of our 300-millimeter Uozu fab in Japan. Equipment should begin to arrive in this center, with most to all tools expected to be qualified during the first half of 2020. This investment not only increases our 300-millimeter wafer capacity but will drive additional benefits that tie to new and large 200-millimeter partnership activities. At image sensing, most of the capacity growth there is indeed at the end of 2020 and 2021, 2022."

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Journal of Applied Physics publishes a paper "Organic photodetectors with frustrated charge transport for small-pitch image sensors" by Z. Ma and C. K. Renshaw from University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL.

"We demonstrate a frustrated organic photodetector (F-OPD) that utilizes frustrated charge-transport to quench forward-bias current and provide a low-current, light-independent OFF state. Photocurrent is collected efficiently with −3 V reverse-bias recovering the sensitive OPD response with higher than 10-bit dynamic range. This intrinsic switching mechanism eliminates the need for thin-film transistors (TFTs) to provide readout control in high-resolution image sensors. Eliminating TFTs simplifies fabrication processing, improves fill-factor, and enables higher resolution image sensors on nonplanar, stretchable, or large-area substrates for a variety of imaging applications. We simulate image sensors and show that the performance is limited by the OFF state uniformity experimentally observed across 45 devices. We simulate performance in a 900-pixel array and show that the demonstrated F-OPDs can scale into megapixel arrays with a noise-equivalent power of less than 0.6 mW/cm2 and a dynamic range of more than 6-bits; better uniformity can substantially improve this performance for large arrays."


"The F-OPD utilizes a blocking layer integrated with the OPD to frustrate charge collection and provide a low-current OFF state under forward bias. A few volts of reverse bias switches the pixel into a conducting ON state where the OPD photocurrent is efficiently collected."


"We have demonstrated F-OPDs utilizing frustrated charge-transport to enable transistor-free pixels for organic image sensors. A blocking layer at the anode reduces forward-bias current a thousand-fold and provides a low-current, light-independent OFF state; meanwhile, a few volts of reverse-bias recovers the high sensitivity and dynamic range typical of OPDs. The F-OPD operates like conventional passive pixels but elimination of the readout transistor avoids (1) allocation of pixel area to the transistor, (2) definition of subpixel features for drain/source/gate/insulator/channel, and (3) additional gate interconnects spanning the circuit. Pixel functionality is defined by a single, monolithic stack to allow nearly 100% FF and small-pixel-pitch using minimal fabrication steps. Combined with high-resolution transfer patterning for organic circuits,12 F-OPDs could enable scaling OISs to a less than 10 μm pixel-pitch limited only by edge effects and lateral photoconductive leakage. This streamlined processing can also reduce cost for curved, flexible, lightweight, large-area, and/or attritable OISs."

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IFNews: Credit Suisse report on Asia semiconductor market has a part about Kingpack CIS packaging business for ON Semi. Kingpack uses its proprietary wirebonding technology to make the tiny iBGA packages which has been qualified with AEC Q-100 Grade 1. "Kingpak holds a strong position in the automotive CIS packaging market and the company should be able to sustain its leading position as the company is the only supplier certified by AEC-Q100 Grade 1 qualification."

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ResearchGate, Arxiv.org: University of Glasgow, UK, paper "Imaging Through Noise With Quantum Illumination" by Thomas Gregory, Paul-Antoine Moreau, Ermes Toninelli, and Miles J. Padgett proposes a detection technique that preferentially select photon-pair events over isolated background events. This is somewhat similar to what SPAD designers do to reject the sunlight, but not exactly the same:

"The contrast of an image can be degraded by the presence of background light and sensor noise. To overcome this degradation, quantum illumination protocols have been theorised (Science 321 (2008), Physics Review Letters 101 (2008)) that exploit the spatial correlations between photon-pairs. Here we demonstrate the first full-field imaging system using quantum illumination, by an enhanced detection protocol. With our current technology we achieve a rejection of background and stray light of order 5 and also report an image contrast improvement up to a factor of 5.5, which is resilient to both environmental noise and transmission losses. The quantum illumination protocol differs from usual quantum schemes in that the advantage is maintained even in the presence of noise and loss. Our approach may enable laboratory-based quantum imaging to be applied to real-world applications where the suppression of background light and noise is important, such as imaging under low-photon flux and quantum LIDAR."


"We have demonstrated a quantum illumination protocol to perform full-field imaging achieving a contrast enhancement through the suppression of both background light and sensor noise. Structure within the thermal background illumination is potentially a-priori unknown and therefore cannot be suppressed with a simple ad-hoc background subtraction. Through resilience to environmental noise and losses, such a quantum illumination protocol should find applications in real-world implementations including quantum microscopy for low light-level imaging, quantum LIDAR imaging applications, and quantum RADAR. Improvements in detector technologies such as SPAD arrays capable of time-tagging events should enable time-of-flight applications to be realised and applied outside of the laboratory through the increased acquisition speed and time resolution that they enable."

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Not all LiDARs are expensive. TechInsights teardown report of Volvo 31360888 Brake Assist LiDAR found in V40 car estimates its manufacturing costs at only $22.61, although the retail price is more than $586:

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KoreaTimes. KoreaHerald: SK Hynix said yesterday that it will convert part of its M10 DRAM fab in Icheon, Gyeonggi Province, to CIS production. “This is to reduce DRAM wafer capacity considering the DRAM demand environment and to strengthen the competitiveness of its CIS business,” said the company.

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SeekingAlpha: ST updates on its Q2 imaging business results:

"During Q2, we had at least an Imaging sensor and/or a MEMS device in all of the top 10 smartphones currently on this market. We also continue to earn design wins and ramp shipments for our time-of-flight sensor, analog products and RF products for 4G front-end modules.

Clearly, in Q2, the performance of growth which was higher than the midpoint of our range is mainly related to specialized imaging product.

Well, about specialized imaging also, again, I will not comment on our competitor, but I will comment, okay, the visibility we have and what ST is doing. Well, it is clear that you know that ST is a key player in the 3D sensing for the face recognition. Since 2017 second half, the unique foolproof technology is based on what we call structured light where ST is a key player, and we are still, let's say, growing in this kind of application.

In parallel, components in the smartphone, there is clearly some other components like ambient licensing or, let's say, Time-of-Flight based proximity sensor or autofocus assist or ranging sensor. And clearly, okay, I repeat that we have accumulated a huge volume in this Time-of-Flight and we continue. That's the reason why, as I told you, in the top 10 smartphones on the market today, we have either a special imaging sensor, including this Time-of-Flight or a MEMS sensor. Also, we disclosed to you during the recen