SWIR/NIR QD/2D Sensor Presentations

TechBlick's on-line conference "Printed, Hybrid, Structural & 3D Electronics Quantum Dots: Material Innovations & Commercial Applications" on May 11-12, 2021 has 5 presentations on image sensors:

• Fraunhofer FEP | Organic-on-CMOS Photodetectors for NIR/SWIR Sensing
• Emberion | Hybrid CMOS SWIR Cameras
• IMEC | High Pixel Density Infrared Sensors Enabling Augmented Vision
• SWIR Vision Systems | Commercial High Resolution Quantum Dot SWIR Cameras for Industrial Imaging Markets
• University of Cambridge | State-of-the Art and Future Prospects for 2D Materials and Graphene in Photosensing

Prophesee Event Driven Sensors Presentations

Prophesee publishes 3 presentations at HannoverMesse site: 1, 2, 3. Few slides from the presentations:

Sony Fab 5 Starts Wafer Production

Sony Semiconductor Solutions announces that, starting in April 2021, it has begun operations on the production lines at the new fab built on the premises of Nagasaki Technology Center (“Nagasaki TEC”), a production center owned by Sony Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation. The new fab, dubbed “Fab 5,” will be utilized for the mass production of CMOS sensors.

Nagasaki TEC serves as a production center for CMOS image sensors for smartphones, the main product line within Sony’s Imaging & Sensing Solutions business. Going forward, Sony Semiconductor Solutions plans to expand production facilities at Fab 5 in line with market trends.

Mobileye L4 Self-Driving Solution Uses 13 cameras, 9 LiDARs, and 6 Radars

Intel-Mobileye announces that its latest Mobileye Drive Level 4 self-driving system is commercially available for a variety of autonomous-vehicle customers. The system features True Redundancy that combines two independent perception sub-systems – one powered by cameras, another by radar and LiDAR – each capable of supporting full end-to-end autonomous capabilities.

Smartsens Demos its Voltage Domain Global Shutter Sensor

Smartsens publishes two videos demoing its 9MP SC910GS sensor:

Inivation's Sensor Becomes the First Event-Driven Sensor in Space

IniVation's DAVIS240C vision sensor has become the world’s first ever neuromorphic technology to reach space.

The sensor included in the custom payload was part of the UNSW Canberra Space’s M2 CubeSat satellite, which was successfully launched with Rocket Lab’s ‘They Go Up So Fast’ mission from New Zealand earlier this month.

The mission, a collaboration between Western Sydney University’s International Centre for Neuromorphic Systems (ICNS), UNSW Canberra Space and the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF), brings together emerging technologies that deliver advanced capabilities in Earth observation, maritime surveillance, and satellite communications.

Dr. Kynan Eng, CEO and co-founder at iniVation, emphasized both the ground-breaking possibilities and the collaborative nature of the mission. He said, “As a company focused on ultimate machine vision performance in challenging, power-limited environments, space is about as hard as it gets. We are very excited to see our technology taking the first small steps towards supporting long-term human activities in space.”

Samsung Austin Fab Power Outage Impacted CIS Production, More Production News

IFNews, TrendForce: The Line S2 fab of Samsung in Austin, Texas sustained a power interruption, which has forced it to suspend operation since mid-February, under the impact from the winter storm. TrendForce’s latest investigations indicate that the capacity utilization rate for the entire fab is not expected to climb back to over 90% until the end of March.

According to TrendForce’s investigations, Samsung was able to prepare for the power interruption ahead of time as the company had been forewarned by the local utility. Hence, the loss of WIP (work in progress) wafers caused by the incident was minimal. However, the delay in the resumption of full operation at the plant is expected to last more than two weeks, during which the fab will suspend its wafer input.

CIS logic chips and OLED display drivers are a bulk of 28nm production at the Austin fab, according to Omdia:

According to Omdia, GalaxyCore, OminiVision, and SK Hynix increase prices of their 2MP, 5MP, 8MP and 12MP sensors by 15-20% in 2Q21 due an ongoing shortage of the 8-inch fab capacity:

Microsoft iToF Tutorial

Microsoft Senior Software Architect Oliver Wing posts "Understanding Indirect ToF Depth Sensing."

"How do we measure this phase shift? At the silicon level, each pixel in the Microsoft ToF sensor is comprised of two detectors, or “wells”, that receive photons and turn them into electric charge. Each well can be opened or closed by the sensor control circuit. If we keep each well open for half of a modulation period – side A in sync with the emitter, and side B exactly out of sync – then the returning photons will be split between the two detectors, but at least one well is always ready to catch them. Based on the proportion of photons that accumulate in detector A vs. detector B, we can calculate the shift of the returned signal."

Samsung is Rumored to Stop Pixel Size Race

GizChina quotes rumors that Samsung is going to stop megapixel race and will concentrate on image quality instead of the number of megapixels in its future products.

Huawei and BAIC Announce Self-Driving Car

HuaweiUpdate, HuaweiCentral, GizChina: Huawei and BAIC jointly announce Arcfox Alpha S Huawei HI self-driving car equipped with twelve cameras, three 96-line LiDARs, six radars, and thirteen ultrasound sensors. The computing engine includes Huawei chip with a computing power of 352Tops.

The new car demonstrates an impressive ability of autonomous driving on the busy streets of Shanghai:

Review of MoS2 Based Photodetectors

MDPI publishes University of Trento, Italy, paper "MoS2 Based Photodetectors: A Review" by Alberto Taffelli, Sandra Dirè, Alberto Quaranta, and Lucio Pancheri.

"Photodetectors based on transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) have been widely reported in the literature and molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) has been the most extensively explored for photodetection applications. The properties of MoS2, such as direct band gap transition in low dimensional structures, strong light–matter interaction and good carrier mobility, combined with the possibility of fabricating thin MoS2 films, have attracted interest for this material in the field of optoelectronics. In this work, MoS2-based photodetectors are reviewed in terms of their main performance metrics, namely responsivity, detectivity, response time and dark current. Although neat MoS2-based detectors already show remarkable characteristics in the visible spectral range, MoS2 can be advantageously coupled with other materials to further improve the detector performance Nanoparticles (NPs) and quantum dots (QDs) have been exploited in combination with MoS2 to boost the response of the devices in the near ultraviolet (NUV) and infrared (IR) spectral range. Moreover, heterostructures with different materials (e.g., other TMDs, Graphene) can speed up the response of the photodetectors through the creation of built-in electric fields and the faster transport of charge carriers. Finally, in order to enhance the stability of the devices, perovskites have been exploited both as passivation layers and as electron reservoirs."