BusinessWire: Invisage announces SparkP2 sensor featuring global shutter, 3x higher light response in 940nm NIR band and over 20x lower power consumption than competing solutions. SparkP2 is a 1.1 um pixel, 2MP QuantumFilm sensor in 1/7-inch format for a less than 3mm thin z-height.
Talking about structured light 3D sensors, InVisage QuantumFilm global shutter works in tune with a pulsed LED, which optimizes the LED battery usage to be just 10 mW (versus 750 mW for LEDs used with rolling shutter NIR cameras). SparkP2’s fast global shutter allows the NIR light source to be pulsed for extremely short intervals instead of remaining continuously illuminated, thus overcoming sunlight while at the same time capturing movement more accurately and using far less net power.
SparkP2 is sampling in April 2016 with mass production scheduled by Summer 2016.
Brian O’Rourke, Senior Principal Analyst, Consumer Devices and MEMS & Sensors at IHS Technology, said in an email to VentureBeat, “There’s certainly opportunity here for InVisage. The types of use cases that they’re going after, such as facial and iris recognition, depth-mapping and eye and gesture tracking, have a wide variety of imaging applications, from security to online banking to gaming. These will all benefit from better performance in the IR range. These applications should grow significantly over the next few years, from a limited current base. The barrier for InVisage is the strong, established companies that they will be competing against in the image sensor market, companies like Sony, Samsung, OmniVision and ON Semiconductor. As a start-up, it’s extremely difficult to compete against companies that currently generate billions of dollars in revenue in your target market. You not only have to build a better mouse trap, but you have to be able to market it effectively.”
It would be nice to have some specs such as QE in NIR wavelength region and power numbers.
ReplyDeleteThis could be a winner for Invisage if it works well.
ReplyDeleteit can not be a winner if it can not go beyond the silicon spectrum. Uniformity, thermal stability, etc. still issues!
DeleteGlobal shutter, very short depth and power savings are big advantages in the target market. Uniformity maybe not such an issue at 2mp. Long term stability a big problem where colour is critical such as stills but less of an issue in a mono sensor with a short device lifetime.
DeleteWhat is the noise of their sensor? If the noise is 3X higher, then the advantage is zero. The new GS sensors from Aptina and SONY are of very high performance!
DeleteI remember their film is made of somthing like PbSe Qdots, which means better for longer wave length, so this might be their position in market, just think at this or longer wavelength, their sensitivity is 100 times than silicon although their noise is also 100 times.
DeleteSome biometric NIR applications with active illumination (like some among those mentioned in the post) are mostly shot noise limited in SNR. So for such applications QE may well be more important even at the cost of additional read noise for example - it all depends on the application. Anyway without numbers we have no idea what the QE nor the noise really is.
DeleteIn any case, this is at least an application where the quantum film - if it lives up to its claims (obviously still to be proven) probably has a better chance to make a break than in traditional markets.
If the competition is at <8% QE with awful crosstalk then at least there is something to potentially improve on...
It seems that most managers here have not read The Innovator's Dilemma.
ReplyDeleteWithout fact base data on QE, PLS, it looks like the usual InVisage marketing.
ReplyDeleteArgument on "low power consumption on LED, because of global shutter" is also a lot generic to all global shutter...
Please give us data.
How about their smartphone story please? They said that several phone makers have adopted their sensors monthes ago...
ReplyDelete