Basler Stock Skyrockets

Germany-based machine vision and industrial camera maker Basler stock market value more than triples since the beginning of 2017. The company earning reports reveal a surge in its imaging business:

10-05-17
"The strong demand is mainly due to high investments in the electronics industry in Asia along with a widely spread upswing in the market. Furthermore, bottle necks in materials and production led to increasing delivery times and these to early order placements."

09-08-17
"In a very dynamic market environment, Basler AG closed the first half-year of 2017 with new record values in incoming orders and sales. For the first six months of 2017, the VDMA (Verband Deutscher Maschinen- und Anlagenbau, German engineering association) reported the strongest growth for image processing components since 15 years. For German manufacturers of image processing components this meant an order growth by 47 % and a sales growth by 43 % - in the same period Basler's incoming orders grew by 100 % and sales by 62 %.”

Thanks to JK for the link!

Dalsa Enters Production of Industry's First Polarization Line Scan Camera

Teledyne Dalsa announces production of the new Polarization camera in its Piranha family. First announced in Q2 2017, the Piranha4 Polarization camera is now in full production with improved performance.

The camera uses a quadlinear CMOS sensor with nanowire micro-polarizer filters. It captures multiple native polarization state data without any interpolation. With a maximum line rate of 70 kHz, the camera outputs independent images of 0°(s), 90° (p), and 135° polarization states as well as an unfiltered channel.

“Polarization brings vision technology to the next level for many industrial applications. It detects material properties such as birefringence, stress, film, composition, and grading etc. that are not detectable using conventional imaging,” said Xing-Fei He, Senior Product Manager.

The company's whitepaper gives the polarization sensor details:

Recent Stacking Advances Update

Phil Garrou reviews the recent image sensor advances in its IFTLE 353, including IISW 2017 (Hiroshima) papers and Samsung and Sony news. Hybrid bonding is said to be capturing most of the market.

ST Promotes its ToF Presence Detectors

ST publishes a promotional video on its ToF presence detectors:

Zion Research Forecasts Image Sensor Market Growth

GlobeNewsWire: Zion Market Research report "Image Sensor Market by Technology (CMOS Image Sensor, CCD Image Sensor and Hybrid Image Sensor) for Aerospace, Automotive, Consumer Electronics, Healthcare, Industrial, Entertainment, Security & Surveillance and Other Applications: Global Industry Perspective, Comprehensive Analysis and Forecast, 2016-2022" unveils the company's view on the image sensor market:

"The image sensor is a sensor that senses and delivers the information. The information detected by the image sensor comprises an image.
<...>
ABB Ltd, Vishay Intertechnology, Inc, Delphi Automotive LLP, Honeywell International, Inc, Raytek Corporation, Meggitt Sensing Systems, Analog Devices Inc., Infineon Technologies AG, Motorola Solutions, Inc., Robert Bosch GmBH, Siemens AG and others are the major players in the image sensor market."

FLIR Boson Teardown

SystemPlus publishes a reverse engineering report on FLIR Boson low-cost LWIR camera module:

"The FLIR Boson camera core occupies only 4.9cm3 without its lens, including a 320×256 pixel microbolometer and an advanced processor. The system is made very compact and easy for integrators to handle. It includes a new chalcogenide glass for the lens and a powerful Vision Processing Unit for the first time.

The thermal camera uses 12µm pixels based on a vanadium oxide technology microbolometer, the ISC1406L, which features a 320×256 resolution and wafer-level packaging (WLP) to achieve a very compact design. The die is half the size of the one in the oldest ISC0901 model, but gives the same definition."

Fly Vision vs Human Vision

BBC publishes an article "Why is it so hard to swat a fly?" comparing human vision with fly vision:

"...have a look at a clock with a ticking hand. As a human, you see the clock ticking at a particular speed. But for a turtle it would appear to be ticking at twice that speed. For most fly species, each tick would drag by about four times more slowly. In effect, the speed of time differs depending on your species.
This happens because animals see the world around them like a continuous video. But in reality, they piece together images sent from the eyes to the brain in distinct flashes a set number of times per second. Humans average 60 flashes per second, turtles 15, and flies 250."

Intel Project Alloy Cancelled

SlashGear: Intel work on Project Alloy "Merged Reality" headset featuring RealSense 3D camera has been stopped. In a statement to RoadToVR Intel says:

"Intel has made the decision to wind down its Project Alloy reference design, however we will continue to invest in the development of technologies to power next-generation AR/VR experiences. This includes: Movidius for visual processing, Intel RealSense depth sensing and six degrees of freedom (6DoF) solutions, and other enabling technologies..."

TechInsights Unveils iPhone 8 Plus Camera Surprises

TechInsights was quick to unveil few finding from iPhone 8+ reverse engineering:

The dual rear camera uses 1.22um pixel size in 12MP wide angle sensor and 1.0um pixel is 12MP tele sensor. The 7MP front camera has 1.0um pixel size.

"The dual camera module size is 21.0 mm x 10.6 mm x 6.3 mm thick. Based on our initial X-rays it appears the wide-angle camera uses optical image stabilization (OIS), while the telephoto camera does not (the same configuration as iPhone 7 Plus).

The wide-angle Sony CIS has a die size of 6.29 mm x 5.21 mm (32.8 mm2). This compares to a 32.3 mm2 die size for iPhone 7’s wide-angle CIS.

We do note a new Phase Pixel pattern, but the big news is the absence of surface artifacts corresponding to the through silicon via (TSV) arrays we’ve seen for a few years. A superficial review of the die photo would suggest it’s a regular back-illuminated (BSI) chip. However, we’ve confirmed it’s a stacked (Exmor RS) chip which means hybrid bonding is in use for the first time in an Apple camera!"

Cameras with Black Silicon Sensors Reach the Market

It came to my attention that a number of Japanese camera companies started selling cameras with SiOnyx Black Silicon sensors. One of these companies is Bitran with CS-64NIR cooled camera based on XQE-0920 sensor. The company publishes a presentation with the application examples for the new camera sensitive up to 1200nm.

Another company is ACH2 Technologies selling ACH100-NIR camera, saying it's sensitive up to 1400nm:

Yet another company is Artray with two cameras: 1.3MP ARTCAM-130XQE-WOM and 0.92MP ARTCAM-092XQE-WOM.

It's very nice to see a new, radically different technology finally reaching the market.