Monday, February 07, 2011

Aptina Announces 1.1um and 1.4um BSI Pixels

Business Wire: Aptina announced that it will be showing its new 1.1 and 1.4-micron backside BSI sensors at the 2011 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. Invited guests will see a live demonstration of an 8MP 1/4” 1.1-micron BSI image sensor, and an 8MP 1/3.2” 1.4-micron BSI image sensor for mobile applications. “We strive for the perfect pixel,” said Gennadiy Agranov, Vice President of Imaging Technology. “Aptina A-Pix technology raised the bar for FSI performance, and now, A-Pix technology is advancing the performance of BSI solutions.

Aptina expects its AR0833, 1/3.2" 1.4-micron 8MP BSI image sensor will be its first BSI product to sample starting in mid-2011. In the second half of 2011, Aptina expects to sample 1.1-micron BSI products including a 12MP 1/3.2” 1.1-micron image sensor, and an 8MP 1/4” 1.1-micron image sensor.

Aptina is currently working with its fabrication partner Micron Technology to support BSI production capacity by CYQ3 2011 in anticipation of ramping products to be manufactured for mobile, digital still and digital video camera applications.

Demand for BSI CMOS image sensors is expected to grow from 10% of cell phone main cameras in 2011 to 20% in 2013, according to TSR.

Business Wire: Other live demos at Barcelona exhibition include:
  • 3D video and depth sensing using Aptina’s sensors and mobile-compatible camera module
  • Advanced DSC-like capabilities using Aptina’s image co-processor for mobile applications
  • Integrated AF module using a liquid crystal AF element

Here is a  VGA picture from 1.1um pixel sensor:

Captured with Aptina 8MP 1.1um BSI Development Product (Photo: Business Wire)

25 comments:

  1. Nice image, bravo!

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  2. It would be even more impressive were it to have been taken in low light conditions.

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  3. Good to see Aptina finally join BSI club. It's taken them much longer than others.
    From what I've seen their 1.4um FSI was not that great compared to other competing BSI folks. Hopefully their BSI looks better than FSI. Would be good to know if they actually see a difference now. :)
    It's nice that they have a 1.1um pixel to show. Should be interesting to see the SNR and dark performance.
    -Ali

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  4. They're almost an year late. This must be their first gen pixel with lots to improve. Although I wonder if the other companies have started selling 1.1um pixels yet.

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  5. I know for a fact that Aptina's 1.4um FSI was no good compared to bsi 1.4um pixels at the time. Guess their bsi is showing them the difference compared to their own fsi 1.4um. Their argument was a bit too hard to believe last two years.

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  6. Aptina is not doing so well for sometime now. Just living it through because of capacity constraints in the market. If they don't ramp these products they'd be dead next year for sure. Rumor is that they've lost a lot of R&D guys recently. Also, I heard their partner has given them a junk fab to work with compared to what they had earlier as micron imaging.

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  7. Aptina is doing perfectly well. People do leave for several reasons but that does not mean the company is not doing fine. Next year we will be bigger and better. If our fab was junk we would not have been selling so many products for last few years. Stop being pessimistic!
    -Ray

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  8. Would like to see their "perfect pixel" performance differences between A-pix FSI Vs A-pix BSI.....
    Alex

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  9. "Aptina is not doing so well for sometime now. Just living it through because of capacity constraints in the market. If they don't ramp these products they'd be dead next year for sure. Rumor is that they've lost a lot of R&D guys recently. Also, I heard their partner has given them a junk fab to work with compared to what they had earlier as micron imaging."

    Sounds like someone who has left Aptina. Just saying.

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  10. What is that yellowish band to the right side of the image?

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  11. what a sharp vision!!!

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  12. only VGA, its 8MP sensor. Can they post full res :) ?

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  13. No. VGA looks better.

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  14. I ask always myself why invest so much money into xxMP sensors but we show always VGA resolution demo image?

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  15. Did any major Image Sensor Company ever post a full res demo image?

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  16. I would have loved to see some raw images. I do know that nobody ever puts them into the public domain. The reason is very simple : based on a single raw image, the sensor characteristics can be analyzed, but nevertheless ... I still welcome raw data.

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  17. Aptina went through similar issues like AMD TLB or Intel Chipset SATA bug, hope they will not repeat it again. They have much catching to do.

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  18. with 4x4 binning, any VGA can be perfect!

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  19. Color noise in the shadow of the image seems quite severe. Even the sky in the upper right corner shows noticeable noise. Considering that it's VGA of which one pixel represents average of 25 original 8M pixels, and has 14dB SNR gain, I'm deeply worried about quality of the original size image.

    Y

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  20. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  21. This is setting the bar for BSI. Actually, the image looks pretty good for the first published image. They will not show full resolution yet. We all know that the image quality continues to improve as the sensor is brought up. Congratulations to the Aptina team.

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  22. There doesn't seem to be any specific information on the processing that went into this image, so it could well be raw data, among other perfectly reasonable possibilities.

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  23. Has any sensor maker started mass production of 1.1um pixel sensors yet?

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  24. CDM, I don't think the image can qualify for any reasonable definition of "raw data". At the very least it already has demosaic, color matrix, white balance, gamma curve, 8-bit conversion, downsample, and JPEG compression.

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