Tuesday, April 14, 2015

Chipworks Confirms Image Sensor Makers inside Samsung Galaxy S6

Chipworks teardown of Samsung flagship smartphone Galaxy S6 confirms that its primary camera sensor is Sony IMX240. IMX240 is a 16MP stacked chip, BSI sensor with a die size of 7.09 mm x 4.68 mm (33.2 mm2) featuring 1.12 µm pixel and an on-chip phase detection pixels for fast AF:


The front-facing camera is based on Samsung S5K4E6, a 5MP BSI sensor with a die size of 5.31 mm x 5.87 mm (31.2 mm2). The pixels have a 1.34 µm pitch:


Update: BusinessWire: IHS publishes Galaxy S6 Edge BOM where the front and rear cameras account for about 7% of the smartphone's cost:

Posted by Vladimir Koifman at 20:27

6 comments:

  1. AnonymousApril 14, 2015 at 10:31 PM

    Hello! Somebody could help me to interpret the saturation signal given by Sony for its image sensors?

    Sony is specifying this parameter in units of mV, for all its image sensors, but I never found how the electronic amplifier convert the electrons in the pixel to mV. In my opinion, it will be much more simple to specify it in "electrons"...

    Thank you very much!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. AnonymousApril 15, 2015 at 5:32 AM

      You need the conversion gain to convert one to the other

      Delete
    2. Albert TheuwissenApril 15, 2015 at 9:01 AM

      It is not just much more simple to specify, but it also allows you to compare sensors with each other. The latter is very difficult when only mV are specified.

      Delete
  2. adiApril 15, 2015 at 12:27 AM

    I think the pixel pitch of the imx 240 is 1.2um instead of 1.12um. Seems like this is the sweet spot for sony's sensors..

    ReplyDelete
  3. Miguel SilvaApril 15, 2015 at 6:37 PM

    I think Sony never released any detailed information about IMX240 sensor, is this the 16MP brother of IMX230? since phones can't do 4K HDR video I suppose the sensor is not able to do this.. Could this be the same sensor in LG G4?

    ReplyDelete
  4. AnonymousApril 16, 2015 at 11:59 PM

    Thank you very much for your replies, Anonymous and Albert. I´ve never found the conversion gain for Sony sensors. The consequence is a lot uncertainties when comparing Sony with different image sensors.

    It´s also important to say that, even for Truesense CCDs, that are very well documented, we can see that the conversion gain from mV to electrons is different for each model.

    Usually, I´m estimating the pixel saturation signal in electrons for these new CMOS sensors with the following role:

    2000*Pixel area(um2) >= Saturation Signal (e-) >= 1000*Pixel area (um2)

    Reference: http://www.clarkvision.com/articles/digital.sensor.performance.summary/

    ReplyDelete

All comments are moderated to avoid spam and personal attacks.

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)