It came to my attention there is a new image sensor startup in France. New Imaging Technologies (NIT) is a fabless company providing both standard products, custom design and technology consulting-licensing. NIT is a spin-off from the French National Telecommunication Institute. Lead by Professor Yang NI, the research team has worked since 1991 on CMOS smart imaging devices for a large variety of scientific, industrial, automotive, biometrics and optical communications applications. Several tens of CMOS application oriented smart sensors have been designed and delivered.
The company has been granted with a R&D contract from the French Ministry of Defense through its DGA operation. NIT will design a specific CMOS imaging sensor using its proprietary wide dynamic range technology (so called MAGIC) to be coupled with an image intensifier for night vision application.
Also, NIT won a design contract with an unnamed major Japanese firm for designing a smart imaging sensor for mass market application. The sensor is said to use a 0,18um process from a large silicon foundry.
Thanks to J.B. for letting me know about the new startup.
Fujifilm Organic CMOS Sensor
MuTaka has brought to my attention a DPNet article in Chinese on organic image sensors - see comments to Tessera post. Unfortunately, I'm unable to understand most of the article, other than seeing that Fuji is making a good progress in the organic sensors.
Potentially, multi-layered organic sensors can over-perform BSI by a big margin. Their biggest advantage is that the dye absorption could be tuned to have very high QE in each of three colors, crosstalk can be minimized and each pixel location can detect and process all three color signals. Bayer sensors, on the other hand, get only one color per pixel, effectively discarding 2/3 of the incoming signal.
Said all this there are few challenges that organic sensors should overcome on their way to the mass market:
Potentially, multi-layered organic sensors can over-perform BSI by a big margin. Their biggest advantage is that the dye absorption could be tuned to have very high QE in each of three colors, crosstalk can be minimized and each pixel location can detect and process all three color signals. Bayer sensors, on the other hand, get only one color per pixel, effectively discarding 2/3 of the incoming signal.
Said all this there are few challenges that organic sensors should overcome on their way to the mass market:
- Process reproducibility and reliability. So far thin film organic photodiodes experience large variation, in comparison with silicon photodiodes.
- Large dark current, orders of magnitude higher than Si photodiodes of the same size
- Noise, primarily kTC noise. It appears that generic 4T pixel architecture used for kTC noise suppression is not applicable for organic sensors. Other techniques for the noise reduction should be developed for them.
Omnivision Wins Microsoft HD Webcam Design
Yahoo: Omnivision announced that its OV9712, a native 720p wide-screen HD video image sensor, was selected by Microsoft for its next generation webcam. The 1/4-inch OV9712 uses a 3-micron OmniPixel3-HS pixel architecture. The sensor supports 30fps speed.
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