Sunday, July 10, 2016

Samsung Applies for Color Splitter Patent

Samsung patent application US20160054172 "Image sensor for producing vivid colors and method of manufacturing the same" by Sookyoung Roh, Sunghyun Nam, Seokho Yun, and Hongkyu Park proposes a color splitter to improve sensitivity of image sensor:

"Although organic dye color filters are widely used in color image sensors, such organic dye color filters absorb light in all but one certain wavelength band. Therefore, using such color image sensors may cause a relatively large amount of light energy loss and a low light efficiency."

So, a color separating beam splitter is proposed. The splitter is made of high refractive material diagonal stripe located inside a low refracting material layer:


Apparently, the simulation show quite high efficiency of the proposed color division scheme comparing with the traditional die based CFA:

8 comments:

  1. But it can only work with FSI senor, am I right?

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    Replies
    1. BSI version should work too, if FSI one works

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    2. But if you deposit a thick dielectric layer on BSI sensor, then you will lost the advantage of BSI device. And also HOW can you deposit a thick dielectric layer?

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    3. Can it be organic material, similar to color filters and microlens?

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  2. How would this proposition likely compare to the latest-gen Foveon sensors in real-world terms?

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    Replies
    1. Which real-world terms you had in mind? Foveon is hardly competetive at anything anyhow.

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    2. The difference is that in Foveon devices, the color detection is done by three photodiodes arranged in a vertical stack so that all three images are geometrically aligned. The proposed detector still has the color detection elements next to each other as in a regular Bayer array.

      The Foveon sensor is one of the options for applications where color alignment is essential. The other options for this are prism-based cameras and sequential filtering or sequential illumination.

      Foveon sensors are not generally competitive elsewhere primarily because they have low frame rates.

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