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I've received TI announcement of a nice 3D ToF camera estimator tool: "TI aims to develop an ecosystem around 3D Time-of-Flight technology that enables many applications apart from the most obvious gesture recognition applications. 3D ToF systems require a lot of collateral support. Some of the obvious questions that comes to a system designer's mind are - How do I know if 3D ToF can solve my problem? What would be the power required to get 'r' mm resolution at 'D' distance at 'F' framerate? What kind of lens would be needed? How does sunlight affect the performance? Do I have sufficient dynamic range or I get saturation with objects at close distance? etc.
To answer all of these questions, TI now provides an internally developed simulation tool here - 3D ToF System Estimator Tool:"

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Business Insider quotes BI Intelligence forecasting 3 million self-driving cars on road in 2020:


The previous BI report predicted 10 million cars with elements of self-driving in 2020:

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Canon develops an APS-H-size (approx. 29.2 x 20.2 mm) CMOS sensor with approximately 250MP (19,580 x 12,600 pixels), said to be the world's highest number of pixels for a CMOS sensor smaller than the size of a 35 mm full-frame sensor. The new sensor achieves a readout speed of 1.25 Giga-pixels per second and can capture a full resolution video at a speed of 5fps. For comparison, modern mobile sensors having 20MP resolution at 30fps frame rate achieve 0.6 Giga-pixel per second speed in a mobile phone form factor.

Canon is considering the application of this technology in specialized surveillance and crime prevention tools, ultra-high-resolution measuring instruments and other industrial equipment, and the field of visual expression.

TechOn publishes a high resolution picture of the new sensor:

Canon 250MP sensor

BBC publishes fairly critical report on Canon announcement.

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The Society for Imaging Science and Technology (IS&T) and Image Engineering GmbH & Co. KG announce that the 2015 Image Engineering Innovation Award (IEIA) is given to Javier Garcia-Monreal, Alex Kipman, Alexander Shpunt, and Zeev Zalevsky for the development of Breakthrough 3-D Sensing Technologies and Products. The award recognizes the innovation in 3-D image sensing developed by PrimeSense and Microsoft and incorporated in the Microsoft Kinect sensor for the Xbox 360 game console. This breakthrough enabled users to control games by gestures and actions.

“This award recognizes four talented innovators, from four different organizations, who pioneered the image depth acquisition hardware and software used in the Microsoft Kinect sensor,” says Ken Parulski, chair of the IEIA award committee. “Their creativity and teamwork enabled Kinect to become the first successful mass-market 3D camera, and the fastest-selling new consumer electronics product ever created.”

3-D images are sensed by an Infrared CMOS image sensor, which captures images of a speckle pattern created using a low-power IR laser and a diffraction grating. The reflected pattern is captured by the IR sensor and correlated with a reference pattern, to produce a depth map of the objects in the color video image.

The Kinect sensor sold 8 million units within the first 60 days of its introduction, making it the most successful 3-D camera. It uses depth sensing technology developed by Zeev Zalevsky at Bar Ilan University, Javier Garcia-Monreal at the University of Valencia, and Alexander Shpunt and his colleagues at PrimeSense in Israel, as well as gesture and face recognition software developed by Alex Kipman and his colleagues at Microsoft.

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Bloomberg reports that Sony is "focusing on sensors that take photos at least 10 times faster than the human eye can see. The company is working with Nissan Motor Co. and a Tokyo University professor on affordable technology that can process 1,000 images a second.

<...>The high-speed sensors could help driverless cars avoid road hazards or allow industrial robots to speed up manufacturing. <...>Chips that capture 1,000 frames per second do exist, but their cost and size make them impractical for mass-market uses. For example, cameras with that kind of speed run $1,000 to $100,000 from companies including Sony and Vision Research Inc. The challenge is to shrink that power into a module small enough to fit in a car’s rear-view mirror and cheap enough for devices such as wearables. <...>the company has been able to achieve 900 frames per second with prototypes.

<...> “Until now, Sony has been very focused on designing image sensors that deliver beautiful photos,” said Shinichi Yoshimura, a Sony manager in charge of combining hardware and software for emerging technologies. “The images for sensing require a different kind of chip, and the challenge is converting technologies that make beautiful photos to new uses.”

“High-speed image sensors are a niche industry, but Sony has the power to take it mainstream,” [Masatoshi Ishikawa, University of Tokyo professor of engineering and robotics, said.] “And that may be just two years away.”

“As smartphone demand matures, at some point other Sony competitors will catch up in this technology,” said Yu Okazaki, an analyst at Nomura Securities Co. in Tokyo. “It is important to diversify applications to robots, cars, et cetera.” <...> the company expects its sales to climb as much as 62 percent to 1.5 trillion yen in three years."

SeekingAlpha quotes Sony CEO, Kaz Hirai, saying that the company "plans to invest €1.5B ($1.7B) in its image sensor ops in FY16 (ends March '16) - 5x what it invested in FY15."

A University of Tokyo spin-off Exvision, lead by Masatoshi Ishikawa, works on high speed image sensor applications:

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re/code, Fortune: AR startup Magic Leap known by a high profile Google investment at a valuation of $2 billion, managed to publish 115 patent applications in just 2 weeks from Aug. 20 to Sept 3. None of these patents relates to image sensors, but Magic Leap's product uses cameras and gesture recognition quite extensively, as shown in the company's Youtube video:

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IISS announces it is preparing a special issue of the journal SENSORS on Photon-Counting Image Sensors to be published in Spring 2016. The issue will contain all invited papers and all will be open-access. Invited authors (up to 20 due to budget) will not be charged any publication fee, open-access fee, or page charges for this special issue, which is sponsored by SENSORS and IISS. The Guest-Editor-in-Chief for the special issue is Eric Fossum (Dartmouth) with guest editors Albert Theuwissen (Delft and Harvest Imaging) and Nobu Teranishi (Univ. Hyogo and Shizuoka University). While there is already a list of potential invited speakers, there may be room for a few more and anyone wishing to be considered for an invited paper should contact Eric Fossum: fossum at imagesensors.org with a very brief proposal as soon as possible. Interest is in deep sub-electron read noise (less than 0 .5e-) devices and readout circuits, including low capacitance devices, devices with avalanche gain, multiple-sampling devices, low temperature devices, high energy photon counting devices as well as image formation algorithms and applications.

The IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices Special Issue on Solid-State Image Sensors (also coordinated by IISS, with Albert Theuwissen as Guest-Editor-in-Chief) is scheduled for publication in February 2016. Many of the 25+ IEEE TED SI papers are already available via early access on-line at IEEE Xplore, but only some are open-access.

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gestigon GmbH, a startup based in Lübeck, Germany, has announced that it closed a third financing round (Series A) in July 2015. The lead investor is nbr technology ventures GmbH, with additional investments from Vorwerk Direct Selling Ventures and High-Tech-Gründerfonds. According to CEO Moritz v. Grotthuss, the amount raised in this round was “several million” USD.

The company will use the funds to accelerate growth in its business, which is focused on licensing its gesture control and skeleton tracking middleware to key corporates in the automotive (where it has assumed global market leadership), consumer electronics, and augmented/virtual reality industries. It now has plans to expand into the rapidly growing field of augmented- and virtual reality solutions, including head mounted devices.

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As ADAS becomes a bigger and more important market for image sensor, Videantis publishes a list of ADAS-related acronyms helping you to navigate in the automotive world. Few examples of this new parlance showing how broad the car camera applications are:

• ANV – Automotive Night Vision. Also known as Night View Assist.
• APS – Automatic Parking System
• BSD – Blind Spot Detection
• BSM – Blind Spot Monitoring
• BSW – Blind Spot Warning
• BOP – Back-over Protection, Back-over Prevention
• CIB – Crash Imminent Braking, Collision Imminent Braking
• CDW – Collision Detection Warning
• CAS – Collision Avoidance System
• CMS – Camera Monitor System
• CTA – Cross-Traffic Alert
• DDW – Drowsy Driver Warning
• DFW – Driver Fatigue Warning
• DDD – Driver Drowsiness Detection
• DMS – Driver Monitoring System
• EDA – Emergency Driver Assistant
• FCA – Forward Collision Avoidance
• FCW – Forward Collision Warning
• GFHB – Glare-free High Beam
• HLA – Head Lamp Assist
• ISA – Intelligent Speed Adaptation, Intelligent Speed Advice
• LCA – Lane Change Assist, Lane Centering Assist
• LD – Lane Detection
• LDW – Lane Departure Warning
• LKA – Lane Keeping Assist
• RVC – Rear view camera
• SVC – Surround View Camera
• WWDA – Wrong-Way Driving Alert
• WWDW – Wrong-Way Driving Warning

There are many more of them on Videantis site, accompanied by the nice explanations.

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ULIS publishes a Youtube promotional video of its Pico384 Gen2 thermal image sensor:

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PRNewswire: EV Group (EVG) announces that the company is experiencing strong demand for its automated 300-mm polymer adhesive wafer bonding systems. Over the past 12 months, the company's order intake has doubled for these systems, including the EVG560, GEMINI and EVG850 TB/DB series of wafer bonders, includes multiple orders from foundries and outsourced semiconductor assembly and test providers headquartered in Asia. Much of the increase in demand is being fueled by advanced packaging manufacturers ramping up production of CMOS image sensors with TSV interconnects.

EVG560

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PRNewswire: Almalence announces that it has received an investment from Intel Capital. The funds will be used by Almalence to develop the next generation mobile imaging technology enabling mobile cameras to achieve the image quality level of DSLR cameras. Intel and Almalence have also entered into a strategic collaboration to bring Almalence's technology to Intel's architecture.

Almalence is a privately owned company with headquarters in Austin, Texas and the team distributed across the world - USA, Russia, Israel, China and South Korea. The company was founded in 2005 by Russian engineers Dmitry Shmunk and Eugene Panich, and has a track record of working with global mobile device manufacturers, such as Huawei and Sharp. Almalence's R&D activity is concentrated in Novosibirsk, Russia.

Eugene Panich, CEO of Almalence said: "Working with Intel will help us to enter a new stage in product development as we take the image quality of mobile cameras to new heights."

Arjun Kapur, Intel CVP, Platform Engineering Group, and GM, Imaging and Camera Technologies Group, said: "We look forward to working with Almalence to deliver such capabilities to the Intel mobile ecosystem."

Here is a Youtube video presenting Amalence Supersensor technology:

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Yole Developpement publishes an interview with Peter Hark, Director of Automotive Sales and Marketing at Sunex. Few quotes:

"The low-end of [ADAS] market concerning rear view cameras is very mature and not very dynamic. The high-end is more about high resolution surround-view cameras from which images are stitched together to give a bird’s eye view of a car, i.e. for parking assist purposes. This area is enjoying high growth. Another growth area are forward-facing cameras which, due to new regulations (especially NCAP in Europe, but also in the U.S.), are being increasingly adopted.

At Sunex, we’ve developed what we call the NoGhost technology, which is able to reduce straylight effects. This has great value for HDR sensors. <...> Likewise thermally-compensated optics add value to computer vision applications such as forward sensing cameras where they can extend the operational temperature range."

Sunex Youtube video shows its NoGhost lens advantages:

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IHS publishes a nice infographics on gesture control market:

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Yole Developpement publishes 2015 Camera Module Industry Report. The Compact Camera Module (CCM) market is forecasted to double in the next five years.

"Driven by mobile and automotive applications, the CCM industry is expected to grow at a CAGR of 16.8% from 2014 - 2020, reaching a total aggregate revenue of US$51B by 2020.

Automotive module revenue reached $1.2B in 2014, and growing at a CAGR of 36% should reach $7.9B by 2020. This exceptional growth has mainly benefited the CCM industry’s second-tier players, but the response of market leaders will be worth watching.

There is a different market trajectory for the lens and sensor markets, which are now maturing at ~14% CAGR with the emergence of giant billion-dollar companies. The CCM and auto-focus manufacturing markets, which are still very fragmented and growing at ~20% CAGR, should experience consolidation over the next five years.

The current CCM industry is controlled by Asian firms, mainly Korean and Japanese, but we’re also witnessing the rise of Chinese firms and the restructure of Taiwanese firms. An ongoing price war has leveled the market, and most players have operations in China or Vietnam."

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IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices opens an early access to ON Semi paper "A 47 Million Pixel High-Performance Interline CCD Image Sensor" by Shen Wang, Douglas A. Carpenter, Adam DeJager, James A. DiBella, James E. Doran, Robert P. Fabinski, Andrew Garland, James A. Johnson, and Ryan Yaniga. The 47MP CCD is said to be "the world’s highest resolution interline-transfer CCD, has been developed for industrial, machine vision, and aerial photography applications. The sensor features a 5.5-µm pixel, 16-output low-noise amplifier and a low-smear, fast-dump gate, horizontal lateral overflow drain, and on-chip temperature sensor. One challenge to manufacture this large sensor is stitching the sensor with different lithography tools, while still achieving equal or better image performance than its predecessor."


IEEE Journal on Solid-State Circuits publishes an open access paper "A Dynamic Vision Sensor With 1% Temporal Contrast Sensitivity and In-Pixel Asynchronous Delta Modulator for Event Encoding" by Yang, M., Liu, S.-C., and Delbruck, T., University of Zurich and ETH Zurich, Switzerland. "A dynamic vision sensor (DVS) encodes temporal contrast (TC) of light intensity into address-events that are asynchronously transmitted for subsequent processing. This paper describes a DVS with improved TC sensitivity and event encoding."


Thanks to DSSB for the links!

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Hynix Q3 2015 catalog lists 13MP, 1.12um pixel sensor engineering samples planned for Q4 2015:

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BusinessWire: Tessera announces the acquisition of Ziptronix for $39 million in cash. Ziptronix’s patented ZiBond direct bonding and DBI hybrid bonding technologies have been licensed to Sony for volume production of its CMOS image sensors.

Dan Donabedian, President and CEO of Ziptronix says, “We’ve taken our technology from concept to commercialization in the backside illuminated image sensor and RF markets. Joining the Tessera family of companies combines our efforts with a proven leader in technology development and licensing in the semiconductor industry. This is a great alignment of companies that can address rapidly expanding 2.5D and 3D-IC markets.”

The addition of the Ziptronix team will not change Tessera’s target operating expense structure. Tessera is making no adjustments to third quarter 2015 revenue or earnings per share guidance.

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SeekingAlpha publishes Omnivision's quarterly earnings call transcript. The company CEO Shaw Hong says on the acquisition status by Hua Capital Management, CITIC Capital, and GoldStone Investment:

"Currently, we expect the transaction will close in the third or fourth quarter of this fiscal year. However, the transaction is still subject to regulatory approvals, including antitrust review in the People’s Republic of China, review and clearance by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., clearance or approval under applicable Taiwan law, and other customary closing conditions.

As of today, we have not obtained all the necessary approvals, nor have we met all the closing conditions. As such, there’s no assurance that the proposed acquisition by the consortium will close."

Aurelio Cisneros, SVP of WW Sales updates:

"In our first fiscal quarter, we shipped 215 million units, as compared to 180 million units in our prior quarter, reflecting strength in our mobile market and strong growth in our automotive and security markets.

Unit sales of 8-megapixel and above represented approximately 19% of total shipments in the fiscal first quarter equivalent to the prior quarter. Unit sales of 3 to 5-megapixel category represented approximately 40% of total shipments, as compared to 38% in the prior quarter for the same category. Unit sales of 2-megapixel and below represented approximately 41% of total shipments, as compared to 43% in the prior quarter.

In terms of target markets, our mobile phone sales represented approximately 65% of revenues in the first fiscal quarter, as compared to 69% in the prior quarter. Our automotive segment represented 10% of sales, as compared to 9% in our prior quarter. Quarter-on-quarter, the automotive market showed a robust 25% growth.

One fast emerging category is the virtual reality or augmented reality headsets being designed by a vast variety of brand-name OEMs or high potential startups. This category has a broad scope of applications from entertainment, gaming, education, industrial, enterprise, or simply web surfing. We have begun shipping early mass production volumes to a Tier 1 brand-name customer, utilizing our highly specialized global shutter sensors. We are also engaged in several other virtual reality and augmented reality, headset potential applications and designs."

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Adimec publishes "Top 5 predictions for the future in machine vision." Out of the top 5, two trends are related to image sensors:

• Trend #1 From CCD to CMOS even for high-end machine vision and defense systems.
• Trend #2 Smaller pixels for industrial image sensors.

"Today’s pixel sizes are 4.5 to 5.5 um (industrial cameras – much smaller in the consumer/ cell phone market). In 2-3 years, industrial sensors will have pixel sizes of 3 to 3.5 um. We anticipate this will be the end of the pixel size race. Now image sensor developers are able to focus on functionality such as improving the global shutter and performance."

Thanks to TL for the link!

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Infineon marketing has coined a new name for its PMD-based ToF image sensors - REAL3. It looks like the REAL3 family of two sensors is the same as before, just their family name has been changed:

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Electronics Weekly: Consumer demand for connected home products, including wireless security cameras, dropped dramatically in the first half of 2015, according to Argus Insights. "Early adopters have gotten what they need, and now products are not compelling typical consumers to create a connected home."

"The big buzz last year was over security cameras. Dropcam was huge, and made even more news when it was acquired by Nest Labs, which had previously been acquired by Google. (The recent Nest camera has been more coolly received.) Kickstarter launches, such as the Canary and Piper security cameras attracted a lot of attention to the market, resulting in more new product introductions, but the optimism of 2014 turned into the reality of 2015 as that market has dropped, due partly to connectivity and usability issues."

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Samsung presentation on DSC and DSLR cameras has a collection of statistical data on customer requests to the DSLR camera image sensors. Most of these requests are known, but now they come with statistics:


Then, Samsung shows how its new 65nm CIS process answers to the user requests:


According to an internal Samsung 2015 market forecast, the company aims to capture 27% market share in mobile CIS and 14% share in other CIS:

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All papers of 2015 International Image Sensor Workshop (IISW) are now open for on-line access.

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IHS Electronics360 talks about many new companies coming to fight for the lucrative ADAS market, including the image processing side of it: Xilinx, Nvidia, Intel, Qualcomm.

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Pixelplus has updated its logo and web site and added the info on its financial performance over the last three years. The last year's revenue was about $104M:

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SD Optics publishes a Youtube video showing how its MALS-based fast AF can be used for image sensor defect checks:

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Photoblographer and Polaroid user at Reddit noticed an interesting trend of instant film camera rise in Fujufilm IR Presentation dated by May 19, 2015:


Update: The recent Fujifilm quarterly earnings report from July 30, 2015 upholds the instant photo camera business forecast:

"The number of sales in volume of instant camera in 1Q was 1.03 million and the target volume for this fiscal year remains the same at 4.60 million"

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As EF mentioned in comments to Stratio post, IR Laboratories acquired the assets of NoblePeak Vision Corp, the developer of TriWave Ge-enhanced CMOS SWIR FPA's, in 2010.

From the company's whitepaper:

"NoblePeak Vision has solved the problem of growing thick, pure defect free germanium on silicon with its TriWave® technology. Figure 2 shows schematically our growth technique which traps dislocations by exploiting their characteristic diagonal propagation. A single crystal seed emerges from the narrow aperture and serves as a crystalline template for a large defect-free island. The island is formed after silicon transistor formation. The conventional back-end of the CMOS process then proceeds as usual, with alternating layers of dielectric and metal used to interconnect transistors and to connect the germanium photodiode to the circuitry."


"Figure 3 shows a scanning electron micrograph (SEM) of one such island integrated into a 180 nm CMOS process with three levels of metal and a reflow micro lens used to increase fill factor. TriWave detectors of size from 2 um to 5.6 um and imaging arrays with pixels of size 7 um and 10 um have been fabricated in this technology."


"Figure 5 shows the measured spectral response compared to theoretical predictions for bulk germanium at 220K. The cut off is at longer wavelength than predicted, due to grown-in strain."


VGA Tri-Wave sensor:

• Package Cu W base, Covar lid, 26 pin, AR Sapphire window
• 21mm x 21mm x 13.5mm
• Hermetically sealed, Xenon backfilled
• 4-stage TEC provides cooling to -80 C in ambient temperatures up to +40C

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Canon publishes a white paper on its recently announced C300 Mark II 4K Digital Cinema camera and a new Super 35mm sensor in its heart:

"Canon R&D never stops and a totally new generation CMOS Super 35mm image sensor is the heart of the stunning imagery of the C300 Mark II. Further innovations within the second generation proprietary photodiode design in combination with on-chip noise cancellation technology have simultaneously lowered the noise floor and elevated the saturation level of the charge well. In addition, a totally new microlens design heightens the efficiency of light direction onto the individual photodiodes – a combination that achieves a more than two-fold increase in effective sensor dynamic range. This provides a definitive 15-Stop dynamic range capability in this new cinematography camera.

The more controlled noise floor allows the ISO range to be extended up to ISO 102,400. The Luma signal to noise ratio is a superb 67dB over a range of ISO settings. In the original C300 image sensor there were two fast readout modes – one, at 1/60 sec progressive and another at 1/120 sec interlace. The new image sensor in the C300 Mark II has a single readout capability of up to 1/120 sec progressive – further reducing rolling shutter skew effects."


"The C300 Mark II has a significant extension of dynamic range to 15-Stops – offering impressive HDR imaging capabilities – and the linear light digital representation for each of the 2K / HD video components is at a high 14-bit depth. This, in turn, allows for a far more favorable disposition of digital codes when mapping the nonlinear Opto Electronic Transfer Function (OETF) – a logarithmic curve termed Canon Log2.

An important extension was made to the Canon Log2 curve above the peak white level (the maximum level that can be delivered by the image sensor) – this being a 2-Stop continuation of the transfer function that is intended to support possible “push-pull” image manipulation in the color grading process."

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