Samsung 108MP Sensor to Feature in Xiaomi Smartphone

NextWeb, DPReview: At a briefing in China, Xiaomi announces it is to become the first manufacturer to use Samsung’s new 108MP ISOCELL sensor. The maximum resolution of that sensor will be 12,032 x 9,024 pixels:

Thanks to TS for the pointer!

IHS Markit: Hynix CIS Sales to Rise 10x in 3 Years

IFNews: IHS Markit reports that multi-camera smartphones and ToF solutions adoption benefits most image sensor manufacturers but in different degree. Hynix CIS sales are forecasted to jump 10x from 2018 to 2020, while other companies are expected to grow by 20-50%:

Under-display selfie cameras is in development by major smartphone camera makers. However, the technology needs more time to solve the issues of display transparency and uniformity in the camera area:

Meanwhile, TF Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo forecasts a large growth of under-display fingerprint sensors in smartphones:

IRay Gets Closer to Diffraction Limit with 10um Pixel Microbolometers

Yantai, China-based IRay unveils its 10um pixel microbolometers, said to be the first in China. The first product has 1280 x 1024 resolution and features:

• Vanadium oxide pixels
• Integrated 14b ADC
• 30fps speed
• Better than 40mK NETD
• Small pixel optics and algorithms

Thanks to YN for the pointer!

LiDAR News: Quanergy, Ouster, AI Spoofing

Quanergy publishes a video explanation of its LiDAR approach:



Ouster article "The Dead Bug Problem" emphasize the importance of larger lens:

"...lidar sensors with smaller optical apertures are less resilient to obscurants. Opaque or refractive obscurants, like a raindrop, can deflect laser light, attenuate the lidar signal and thereby reduce range in that pixel. With larger beam aperture, signal strength is only partially attenuated instead of completely blocked, and the point cloud would show minimal impact."

University of Michigan and University of California, Irvine project "Adversarial Sensor Attack on LiDAR-based AV Perception" claims to find a way to fool Baidu Apollo AI-based autonomous driving platform into perceiving an obstacles in close distances to the front of a victim AV:

"In this work, we perform the first security study of LiDAR-based perception in AV systems. We consider LiDAR spoofing attacks as the threat model, and set the attack goal as spoofing front-near obstacles. We first reproduce the state-of-the-art LiDAR spoofing attack, and find that blindly applying it is insufficient to achieve the attack goal due to the machine learning-based object detection process. We thus perform analysis to fool the machine learning model by formulating the attack task as an optimization problem. We first construct the input perturbation function using local attack experiments and global spatial transformation-based modeling, and then construct the objective function by studying the post-processing process. We also identify the inherent limitations of directly using optimization-based methods and design a new algorithm that increases the attack success rates by 2.65× on average. As a case study, we further construct and evaluate two attack scenarios that may compromise AV safety and mobility. We also discuss defense directions at AV system, sensor, and machine learning model levels."

ON Semi Updates on its Imaging Business

ON Semi Q2 2019 earnings call updates on its image sensor business:

"In ADAS applications, our momentum continues to accelerate. We are seeing strong interest from customers in our broad portfolio of automotive image sensor products. Recall that we are the only provider of automotive image sensors with complete portfolio of 1 megapixel, 2 megapixel and 8 megapixel image sensors. The breadth of our portfolio has enabled us to secure many design wins from leading global OEMs and tier-1s."

TSMC Offers 1550nm Sensing Platform

TSMC publishes its LiDAR and HDR sensing automotive portfolio mentioning 1550nm NIR+ Gen2 imaging platform:

"TSMC's pixel-level stacking technology enables higher resolution, HDR and Global shutters that are imperatives in fully autonomous vehicles. Our high QE(Quantum Efficiency) NIR technology enhances vehicle night vision. NIR+ at visible wavelength and NIR+ Gen2 at longer wavelength are being added to the portfolio, to make 940nm/1550nm Lidar sensor feasible."

Trinamix Publishes Spec Examples of its 3D Cameras

Trinamix publishes some examples of 3D cameras based on its technology:

Techinsights Smartphone Imagers Review - Part 4

Techinsights publishes part 4 of the state of the art of smartphone imagers review, the omitted part from Ray Fontaine's presentation at IISW 2019 in June "Non-Bayer CFA, Phase Detection Autofocus (PDAF)."

Omron Proximity Sensor

PRNewswire: OMRON launches the Light Convergent Reflective Sensor "B5W-LB series" for industrial applications. The sensor uses OMRON's unique lens structure combining four types of aspherical lenses for stable detection with a wide sensing range regardless of colors and materials such as shiny, black, and transparent surface:

Samsung Foundry Reports CIS Sales Growth

Samsung Q2 2019 report has an interesting part that the company's CIS foundry business is growing. Also, Samsung high resolution smartphone sensors and large pixel sensors show the growth:

SeekingAlpha earnings call transcript gives few more details:

"In the second quarter, as Chinese smartphone continues to intensify the competition for the camera spec, demand for multiple cameras and higher resolution, big-pixel, image sensors increased more, and we have achieved solid results.

Noticeably, demand for high value-added products is also expected to continue to increase because customers still want to differentiate product by adopting the products such as 64 megapixel image sensors and EUV 7-nano, APs, et cetera.

Looking ahead, we plan to expand our lineup of our 5G chipset solutions and image sensors to address demand for the high specs in the smartphone market and we will also expand our mid to long-term business scope by diversifying our product offerings through the development of the 3D and FoD sensors and automotive IoT chips.

...in terms of revenue of our entire System LSI business, image sensors account for about one-third."