Aptina Applies for Patents on Stacked Sensors

This week USPTO published a no less than 8 Aptina's patent applications, two of them on stacked image sensors. US20130293753 application titled "Image Data Compression in Stacked Image Sensors" by Brian Keelan and Dhandapani Dharumalingam proposes a partitioning of the pixel array into many sub-arrays, each having independent row addressing and readout:

The frame rate of each of the sub-arrays might be different, depending on the scene. The image compressing processor chooses a different compression block size and other compression parameters for each sub-array:

US20130293752 application titled "Exposure Time Selection Using Stacked-Chip Image Sensors" by Honghong Peng and Brian Keelan proposes to use different exposure times for different sub-arrays, based on motion information determined by stacked processing circuitry: