Strategy Analytics on H1 2021 Smartphone CIS Market

Strategy Analytics estimates that Sony has captured 42% smartphone CIS market share in H1 2021 and 41% in Q2 2021. The whole smartphone CIS market grew 10% YoY in H1:

"The global smartphone Image sensor market in H1 2021 clocked a total revenue of $7 billion.

This Strategy Analytics research report finds that the smartphone image sensor market managed to record a revenue growth of more than 10 percent year-over-year in H1 2021.

The report estimates that the top three vendors took almost 80 percent revenue share in the global smartphone image sensor market in H1 2021.

Jeffrey Mathews, Senior Analyst at Strategy Analytics says, “The image sensor vendors witnessed an accelerated momentum from smartphone OEMs, who actively adopted high-resolution CIS and low-pixel CIS products for multicamera applications, to secure inventory and cater to pent-up demand. Sony, Samsung and OmniVision supplied key high-resolution CIS products to leading smartphone OEMs in H1 2021.”

Stephen Entwistle , Vice President of the Strategic Technologies Practice at Strategy Analytics commented, “The introduction of new high-resolution and large format CIS products from the major vendors are expected to boost the revenue opportunities in the market. However, we note that the supply fluctuations of various high-pixel and low pixel CIS products continue to challenge the growth prospects of the smartphone image sensor market.”

Low Noise SPAD in 180nm Process

IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics publishes EPFL and KIST paper "A Low-noise CMOS SPAD Pixel with 12.1 ps SPTR and 3 ns Dead Time" by Francesco Gramuglia, Ming-Lo Wu, Claudio Bruschini, Myung-Jae Lee, and Edoardo Charbon.

"Single-photon avalanche diodes (SPADs) have become the sensor of choice in many applications whenever high sensitivity, low noise, and sharp timing performance are required, simultaneously. Recently, SPADs designed in CMOS technology, have yielded moderately good performance in these parameters, but never equaling their counterparts fabricated in highly customized, non-standard technologies. The arguments in favor of CMOS-compatible SPADs were miniaturization, cost and scalability. In this paper, we present the first CMOS SPAD with performance comparable or better than that of the best custom SPADs, to date. The SPAD-based design, fully integrated in 180 nm CMOS technology, achieves a peak photon detection probability (PDP) of 55% at 480 nm with a very broad spectrum spanning from near ultraviolet (NUV) to near infrared (NIR) and a normalized dark count rate (DCR) of 0.2 cps/µm^2, both at 6V of excess bias. Thanks to a dedicated CMOS pixel circuit front-end, an afterpulsing probability of about 0.1% at a dead time of ∼3 ns were achieved. We designed three SPADs with a diameter of 25, 50, and 100 µm to study the impact of size on the timing jitter and to create a scaling law for SPADs. For these SPADs, a single-photon time resolution (SPTR) of 12.1 ps, 16 ps, and 27 ps (FWHM) was achieved at 6 V of excess bias, respectively. The SPADs operate in a wide range of temperatures, from -65◦C to 40◦C, reaching a normalized DCR of 1.6 mcps/µm^2 at 6 V of excess bias for the 25 µm at -65◦C."

Galaxycore 12-inch BSI Facility to Start Production in 2 Years

Laoyaoba: Galaxycore says on the investor interaction platform that the company's 12-inch CIS BSI facility construction is progressing smoothly, and the main building has been capped on August 16. The company expects to start the production in 2 years. The fab capacity is 20,000 wafers per month.

In 2018, 2019 and 2020, the gross profit margin of Galaxycore's CMOS sensors was 25.32%, 27.50% and 28.54%, respectively which is similar to or even higher than that of its competitors. Galaxycore is confident in the competitiveness of its new high-end products in development now.

Open Letter from Junichi Nakamura, New President of the International Image Sensor Society

Open Letter from the New President

Dear all,

This time, I was elected as a new President of International Image Sensor Society (IISS) by the IISS Board of Directors at the Board meeting just after the 2021 International Image Sensor Workshop (IISW) closure. It is my great pleasure and honor to serve as President of IISS and I will try my best to improve services of IISS/IISW.

As was mentioned at the very beginning of the 2021 IISW by Johannes Solhusvik, the General Chair of the 2021 IISW, the key concept of the IISW is to provide an opportunity to exchange the latest progress in image sensor and related R&D activities to the top image sensor technologists in the world in an informal atmosphere. This concept was conceived by Eric Fossum, the Founder of this series of workshop, at the very first workshop in 1986 (named “IEEE Workshop on CCDs”), and has been realized and enhanced by the three former Presidents of IISS, Eric, Nobukazu Teranishi and Albert. This will be kept in the future workshop.

With the retirement of Eric, Nobu and Albert from the Board, the Board of Directors has invited three very strong image sensor technologists to the Board, namely, Boyd Fowler (OmniVision, USA), Robert Henderson (University of Edinburgh, UK) and Yusuke Oike (Sony, Japan). Please join me in welcoming them to the Board of IISS.

Finally, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the three Co-Founders/former Presidents of IISS for their enthusiasm to “bring the imaging community to a higher level”. The IISS Directors will inherit this spirit. I hope Eric, Nobu and Albert can continue giving us any suggestions and insights as members of the newly established Governance Advisory Committee.

Best regards,

Junichi Nakamura
President of IISS

CTO of Brillnics Inc.

STA Founder Dick Bredthauer Passed Away

As posted in CCD-World mailing list, Semiconductor Technology Associates, Inc. founder Dick Bredthauer passed away.

Dr. Richard Bredthauer was involved in the design and fabrication of a large variety of scientific imaging CCDs from 1975 to 2016. He managed CCD development at Lockheed Martin, Loral, Ford Aerospace, and Rockwell.  He designed the original 9k x 9k imager while at Lockheed Martin, and his CCDs included notable instruments such as Hubble’s WFPC2, all of the visible imagers on Cassini, the stereo camera in Mars Pathfinder, and most recently the lightning imager for GOES-R. In 2016, his son Dr. Greg Bredthauer became president of STA and took over daily operations.

Thanks to GM for the pointer!

Open Letter from Albert Theuwissen

OPEN LETTER TO THE INTERNATIONAL IMAGE SENSOR SOCIETY.

Dear all,

Yesterday (Thursday 23/09/2021) the International Image Sensor Workshop 2021 came to an end. Immediately after the workshop closure we had a meeting with the Board of Directors of the International Image Sensor Society. In that meeting Eric Fossum, Nobukazu Teranishi and Albert Theuwissen (the three co-founders of IISS) announced their retirement from the Board. The retired members will set up a Government Advisory Committee (without any voting rights anymore), but they will be no longer directly involved in the organization of the IISW.

If I speak for myself : it was a great honour and even a greater pleasure for me to work for and to work with Eric, Nobu and all other Board members. This is a group of people that constantly tries to bring the imaging community to a higher level. Imaging has given and still gives me a lot of joy, motivation, strength in my professional live and last but not least also in my private life it brought us a nice piece of bread on our table. So for me it was very normal to give something back to our imaging community by means of my activities in IISS.

Over the years I learned a lot from my involvement in IISS, about how to work with various cultures, how to work with world-level top-experts in the field and how to work with individuals that all have a strong character (otherwise they would not have climbed up to the level where they now are). And very often the cooperation with my Board colleagues put myself in front of the mirror which led to some self-reflection.

I wish IISS and all Board members all the best in the coming future. It is now up to the next generation to manage IISS and I am more than confident that the next generation will succeed. But if needed, they always can count on me for advice.

Best regards from Belgium.

Albert, former president of IISS.

24/09/2021.

IDQ Photon Sensors - from Mobile Phones to Space Launchers

Física Exactas UBA publishes a presentation "Quantum technologies for mobile phones and space launchers" by Félix Bussières ID Quantique SA, Switzerland:

Galaxycore Evaluates its 32MP Sensor Engineering Samples

DailyEconomicNews: In line with its intentions to penetrate mid- to high-end CIS market, Galaxycore announces at the investor interactive platform on September 24: "Dear investors, hello. The company's high-end pixel research and development is progressing smoothly, and the CMOS image sensor with 32 million pixels and above has entered the stage of internal evaluation of engineering samples. Thank you for your attention!"

Smartsens Announces Three BSI Global Shutter Sensors

CoreIntelligence: SmartSens launches three new SmartGS-2 series image sensors-SC350HGS / SC650HGS / SC950HGS with 3MP to 9MP resolutions aimed to industrial cameras for intelligent applications. the QE of the three products reaches 90% at 520nm.

Samples of the three sensors are available now, and mass production is expected to start in Q4 2021.

Excess Noise Reduction in APDs

IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics publishes a paper "Evolution of Low-Noise Avalanche Photodetectors" by Joe C. Campbell from University of Virginia.

"This paper reviews materials and structural approaches that have been developed to reduce the excess noise in avalanche photodiodes and increase the gain-bandwidth product."

"It has been shown for a wide range of materials including InP, GaAs, In1-xAlxAs, Si, AlxGa1-xAs, SiC, GaP, and GaInP that reducing the thickness of the multiplication layer, usually to submicron dimensions, results in lower excess noise. This is contrary to expectations based on the local-field model and points to its inadequacy when the non-local nature of impact ionization becomes significant."

Assorted Videos: Trinamix, Vision Research, Immervision, Teledyne-e2v, Cepton

Trinamix expands its multispectral 3D imaging applications with smartphone behind OLED face recognition and driver monitoring:

Vision Research promotes its fast BSI sensors:

Immervision publishes its SPIE Optical Systems Design International Symposium presentation on freeform lenses in consumer applications:

Teledyne-e2v promotes its linescan sensors:

Autosens publishes interviews with Cepton: