Optilux-Varioptic Separation Explained

CNET published an article on Optilux founded by former Varioptic's CEO Hamid Farzaneh. "Farzaneh has an exclusive license to use the Varioptic technology in consumer products, and funding to develop a manufacturing process to scale up to consumer product run-rates (Varioptic can ship about 100,000 lenses a month, a far cry from the millions that Farzaneh thinks the market will want). Over time, as the new company digs into the consumer market, Optilux technology will diverge from Varioptic.

Optilux is an American company; Varioptic and its acquirer Parrot are both French. [Farzaneh is planning] to set up both R&D and manufacturing in the U.S.

Farzaneh said that having manufacturing next door to U.S. engineers will keep development moving faster. Finally, he says, he needs an automated system for high-volume production, and automated plants are easier to set up next to U.S.-based engineers, compared with the current liquid lens construction techniques, which are based on hand-assembled lenses that benefit from lower (overseas) labor costs.

The timing of all this: We should, Farzaneh says, finally start seeing Optilux liquid lenses in cameras in 2013. These will be the auto-focusing and image-stabilized lenses. The zoom packages could show up in consumer products in 2014."

The original article also has a nice video demo of Optlux focus and image stabilization capabilities.

1-bit Gigapixel Imager Mathematics

A group of authors from Harvard University published a paper on 1-bit gigapixel image processing:

"Gigapixel Binary Sensing: Image Acquisition Using Oversampled One-Bit Poisson Statistics"
Feng Yang, Yue M. Lu, Luciano Sbaiz, Martin Vetterli

The paper can be freely downloaded here.

Digitimes: Omnivision to Supply 90% CIS for iPhone 5, Sony to Supply the Rest

Digitimes reports that about 90% of the CIS orders for Apple's new iPhone 5 will be supplied by OmniVision, while Sony takes up the remainder, according to the newspaper's sources. Thanks to the Apple orders, OmniVision is expected to increase its total wafer starts at TSMC to almost 260,000 8-inch equivalent units in the third quarter, up more than 40% sequentially, the sources indicated.

Pixart to Supply Sensors for Next Geraration Wii

Digitimes: Pixart to supply sensor for the next-generation Nintendo Wii consoles, according to the newspaper's sources. Nintendo is expected to announce the launch data of the new Wii consoles during the ongoing E3 trade fair, with Digitimes' sources believing the new consoles to be available at the end of 2011 or early in 2012.

The next generation Wii supposedly has internal name Project Cafe and is rumored to have a game controller with camera for self-portraits and other photo-related stuff.

Aptina Announced Design Win in Pantech Vega Racer Smartphone

Business Wire: Aptina announced that its CCS8140 imaging solution has been chosen by Pantech for its primary camera in the newly released Vega Racer smartphone. The CCS8140 solution combines the MT9E013 8MP sensor with MT9E311 imaging co-processor and requires only minimal tuning and sensor adjustments to complete the final camera design. The fully tuned sensor and co-processor combination provides flexibility and easy integration for OEMs.

Aptina Proposes Ion Implantation to Modify Passivation Refractive Index

Aptina's patent application US20110127628 proposes to use ion implantation to change passivation layer refractive index:

"FIGS. 2A illustrates the transmission of incident light 202 through CFA 104, passivation layer 106 (106′) and insulation layer 108, when passivation layer 106 (106′) includes impurities. In particular, FIG. 2A illustrates passivation layer 106 having a single refractive index neff.

In conventional image sensors, a passivation layer typically has a refractive index of about 2.0. In contrast, CFA 104 typically includes a refractive index (n1) of between about 1.5-1.7, whereas insulation layer 108 typically includes a refractive index (n2) of about 1.46. Accordingly, the refractive indices n1 and n2 of CFA 104 and insulation layer 108 are typically similar. Because the refractive index of the passivation layer in conventional devices is different from the refractive indices n1 and n2, incident light 202 may be reflected at an interface 214 (between CFA 104 and a conventional passivation layer) and/or at an interface 216 (between a conventional passivation layer and insulation layer 108)."

Invisage Holds Promise for Machine Vision

Test & Measurement World published an article about Invisage QuantumFilm with QuantumShutter sensor. The article seems to be based on an interview with Michael Hepp, InVisage’s director of marketing. Few advantages for machine vision market are presented:

1. Adjustable bandgap of QuantumFilm tunes the sensitivity for specific wavelength range
2. QuantumShutter (a nice word for global shutter) eliminates rolling shutter artifacts
3. Improved QE in range of 80 to 90%
4. Process is simpler than BSI

Hepp said that the QuantumFilm sensors designed for camera phones will have a 1.4um pixel size, and next-generation devices are planned at 1.1um. Invisage's 1.1um pixels can use a 110nm process. "In a 1.4-micron pixel, we can achieve a 12,000-electron well," says Hepp.

TSMC is expected to sample chips made with the process this summer, said Hepp.

Agilent Announces MIPI M-PHY Testing Solution

EETimes-Europe: Agilent Technologies has announced a MIPI M-PHY test solution for debugging and validating all layers of M-PHY devices, including physical and protocol layers, at speeds up to 5.8 Gb/sec. The Agilent solution consists of oscilloscopes, protocol analyzers and exercisers, and bit error-rate testers (BERTs) using custom M-PHY stimulus software. Each instrument comes with custom M-PHY-ready software to support design teams through the entire product design process.

The solution is not cheap:

• The N4903B J-BERT high-performance serial BERT is available now, starting at $102,000 for a 7-Gb/sec pattern generator configuration.
• The N5990A-165 test automation software will be available later this month and is priced at $10,500.
• The M-PHY-based DigRF v4 exerciser/analyzers are currently available starting at $30,000.
• Agilent 90000A and 90000X-Series oscilloscopes with bandwidths up to 32 GHz are available now. Prices start at $60,000 for 6-GHz oscilloscopes.
• M-PHY TX test automation will be available in September.

Sensors and Image Forensics

Hany Farid from Darmouth published a tutorial on image forensics. Some image sensor artifacts help to recognize a forgery:

"a CFA interpolated image can be detected (in the absence of noise) by noticing, for example, that every other sample in every other row or column is perfectly correlated to its neighbors. At the same time, the non-interpolated samples are less likely to be correlated in precisely the same manner. Furthermore, it is likely that tampering will destroy these correlations, or that the splicing together of two images from different cameras will create inconsistent correlations across the composite image. As such, the lack of correlations produced by CFA interpolation can be used to expose it as a forgery."

Also, PRNU can be used to determine if an image is originated from a specific camera, or if a portion of an image has been altered.

PTC and Color

Albert Theuwissen continues his PTC article series, this time covering color sensors' PTC. The article talks about color-specific artifacts, such as these nice curves: