Omnivision Unveils 2 Global Shutter Sensors with 3um Pixels

OmniVision announces two new additions to its family of global shutter sensors—the OG02B1B/OG02B10 and the OV9285. These new sensors are aimed to be cost-effective solutions for consumer and industrial machine vision applications.

“Machine vision applications are experiencing strong growth, fueled by increased demand for industrial automation and new use cases such as augmented reality and virtual reality. Meanwhile, computer vision algorithms are becoming more and more sophisticated, which in turn drives up the performance requirements of image sensors,” said Sanjay Kumar, senior marketing manager at OmniVision. “We are excited to offer these high-resolution and high-performance global shutter image sensors to the machine vision community, enabling new applications and new use cases.”

The 2-megapixel OG02B1B (monochrome) and the OG02B10 (color) image sensors provide 1600 x 1300 resolution in a 1/2.9-inch optical format and a 15-degree CRA to support wide field-of-view lens designs. This combination of color imaging and CRA is excellent for applications such as agricultural drones that must capture high-resolution color images for crop and field monitoring.

The OV9285 provides an even more cost-effective option, with a 1.48-megapixel or 1328 x 1120 resolution, the ability to capture video at 90 fps and an optical format of 1/3.4-inch with a CRA of 9 degrees.

Both sensors are built on 3um OmniPixel3-GS pixel technology. It provides high QE and NIR sensitivity at 850nm and 940nm, which reduces power consumption and extends device battery life.

The OG02B1B, OG02B10 and OV9285 image sensors are available now.

Film-Based Light Sensing Review

University of Toronto repo publishes a Nature paper from January 2017 "Solution-processed semiconductors for next-generation photodetectors" by F. Pelayo García de Arquer, Ardalan Armin, Paul Meredith, and Edward H. Sargent.

"Efficient light detection is central to modern science and technology. Current photodetectors mainly use photodiodes based on crystalline inorganic elemental semiconductors, such as silicon, or compounds such as III–V semiconductors. Photodetectors made of solution-processed semiconductors — which include organic materials, metal-halide perovskites and quantum dots — have recently emerged as candidates for next-generation light sensing. They combine ease of processing, tailorable optoelectronic properties, facile integration with complementary metal–oxide–semiconductors, compatibility with flexible substrates and good performance. Here, we review the recent advances and the open challenges in the field of solution-processed photodetectors, examining the topic from both the materials and the device perspective and highlighting the potential of the synergistic combination of materials and device engineering. We explore hybrid phototransistors and their potential to overcome trade-offs in noise, gain and speed, as well as the rapid advances in metal-halide perovskite photodiodes and their recent application in narrowband filterless photodetection."

Autosens Awards 2018

Autosens announces its 2018 Awards in a number of categories:

Most Engaging Content:

• First place: Junko Yoshida, EE Times
• Silver award: Marco Jacobs, videantis
• Silver award: Stephan Giesler, 2025AD

Hardware Innovation:

• First place: Robert Bosch
• Silver award: Renesas Electronics
• Silver award: OmniVision Technologies

Software Innovation:

• First place: Algolux
• Silver award: Brodmann17
• Silver award: Prophesee

Most Exciting Start-Up:

• First place: AEye Inc
• Silver award: Metamoto
• Silver award: Arbe Robotics

Game Changer:

• First place: Marc Geese, Robert Bosch
• Silver award: Intel Corporation
• Silver award: NVIDIA & Continental Partnership

Greatest Exploration:

• First place: Prof Alexander Braun of the University of Applied Sciences Düsseldorf
• Silver award: Ding Zhao of University of Michigan
• Silver award: Prof Philip Koopman of Carnegie Mellon University

Best Outreach Project:

• First place: Udacity
• Silver award: North West Advanced Programming Workshop Programme (NWAPW)
• Silver award: Detroit Autonomous Vehicle Group

AutoSens Inspiration Award:

• Winner: North West Advanced Programming Workshop Programme (NWAPW)

ActLight DPD Achieves Single-Photon Sensitivity

PRNewswire: ActLight, a Swiss technology startup developing Dynamic PhotoDiodes (DPDs), announces that the results of its internal tests performed on its most recent technology developments show a device sensitivity that reached the single photon level.

Moreover, the tests confirmed that the sensitivity of the DPD is tunable (i.e. at 2, 3, 5 or 7 photons) with very positive impact on the dynamic range of the device. Important to note is that the brilliant results were achieved at 1.5V bias voltage and with devices manufactured using a standard CMOS 180nm technology.

"It's great that today we are among a selected few innovative technologies to have a talk at the Imaging & Sensors Summit, a great opportunity to present our recent developments in the low voltage single photon sensitivity," said Serguei Okhonin, ActLight Co-Founder and CEO. "And we strongly believe that our DPDs can inspire innovation and enhance user experience in main stream applications such as smartphones and others."

In another presentation, ActLight announces a ToF sensor prototype based on its DPD (see demo video here):

"In current 3D camera sensors, pixel scaling is limited due to complex analog circuits. The DPD's simple digital front-end allows decreasing pixel size below 5 um. Moreover, the DPD and its read-out front-end circuit are implemented on the same substrate in standard low-cost CMOS technology and do not require high voltage for its operation."

GPixel Announces Large and Fast Sensor with Global Shutter

Gpixel announces the GMAX3265, a 65MP image sensor with 3.2µm charge domain global shutter pixel. “GMAX3265 is defined in close collaboration with leading industry partners in inspection vision systems, as such are we confident that the unique features of GMAX3265 will meet the most demanding requirements for industrial inspection, machine vision and metrology applications”, said Wim Wuyts, Chief Commercial Officer of Gpixel.

GMAX3265 offers 9344 (H) x 7000 (V) charge global shutter pixels with read noise of less than 2e-, higher than 70dB DR, and 1e-/p/s dark current at room temperature. Due to the light pipe technology, the sensor exhibits excellent shutter efficiency of 1/30,000 and large angular response.

Consisting of 56 pairs sub-LVDS data output channel and each running at maximum 1.08 Gbit/s, GMAX3265 delivers 85 fps at 10bit output or 53 fps at 12bit output. The high resolution and fast frame rate significantly increases the system throughput for industrial inspection applications, such as semiconductor, PCB, AOI or display inspection.

“We understand short time-to-market is essential in today’s competing environment, and at Gpixel, we put a lot of effort in technical and logistic support to enable customers a fast go to market timing. This combined with our long term commitment and product strategy is essential for the success of our growing customer base and Gpixel.”, said Wim.

GMAX3265 will begin sampling in early Q4 2018, with mass production scheduled in end of Q1 2019 for both color and mono version.

Article about Gigajot

Dartmouth College publishes an article about its spin-off Gigajot:

"Gigajot Technology, based in Pasadena, California, aims to bring a variety of products to market using the Quanta Image Sensor (QIS) which makes it possible to produce sharp images in extremely low light. They intend to target high-end scientific research and medical imaging markets at first, but could eventually compete in much larger consumer markets.

“QIS is a platform technology,” says Gigajot CEO Saleh Masoodian, a 2017 Dartmouth engineering PhD graduate who cofounded the company with Fossum and fellow Thayer alum and Gigajot CTO Jiaju Ma Th'17. “Down the road, there are additional markets we can serve, such as security, automotive, and other niche applications.”

“Not only can our imager capture the photons in a very dim scene, but also it can resolve the number of photons and give you a much better quality picture,” says Masoodian, adding that the sensors can be manufactured using current CMOS processes, which he says translates to a high production yield at lower costs.

Masoodian says he hopes to see the company launch its first product-ready QIS camera for use in these niche markets within the next two to three years."

Quantum Imaging Beyond Diffraction Limit

OSA Optica publishes a paper "Super-resolution quantum imaging at the Heisenberg limit" by Manuel Unternährer, Bänz Bessire, Leonardo Gasparini, Matteo Perenzoni, and André Stefanov from University of Bern and Fondazione Bruno Kessler FBK.

"The Abbe–Rayleigh diffraction limit constrains spatial resolution for classical imaging methods. Quantum imaging exploits correlations between photons to reproduce structures with higher resolution. Quantum-correlated 𝑁-photon states were shown to potentially surpass the classical limit by a factor of 1/𝑁, corresponding to the Heisenberg limit, using a method known as optical centroid measurement (OCM). In this work, the theory of OCM is reformulated for its application in imaging. Using entangled photon pairs and a recently developed integrated time-resolving detector array, OCM is implemented in a proof-of-principle experiment that demonstrates the expected enhancement. Those results show the relevance of entanglement for imaging at the Heisenberg limit."

TI Promotes its ToF Solution

TI video promotes its ToF solution:

Two CNES Workshops

French Space Agency (CNES) announces Call for Abstracts for 2 workshops to be held in Toulouse:

Radiation effects on solid state optoelectronic detectors on November 27-28, 2018
Ultra-Violet Detectors and Instruments on November 28-29, 2018

"The goal is to bring together all the community to discuss the challenges to develop such sensors and instruments, to discuss previous mission lessons and to share about future projects.

Although the workshop is mostly oriented to space applications, this event is fully open to researchers/user working within other applications. Developers working on non-space applications dealing with the same topics (e;g; Astronomy, Medical Imaging, photolithography…) are equally welcome to participate to this Workshop."

The workshops also features 45min tutorials.

Active Alignment Demo

Trioptics publishes a Youtube video showing its ProCam active alighnemt system: