Fairchild Imaging CCD-CMOS Hybrid

PRWeb: Fairchild Imaging announced an interesting CCD-CMOS hybrid sensor. The company says:

"The novel hybrid image sensor combines the best of both CCD and CMOS technologies: the high image quality, low dark current and high fill-factor of a CCD with the high speed, low-noise and low power of a CMOS readout. The 1.3 megapixel hybrid sensor delivers extreme low-light imaging performance at video and supra-video frame rates."

To me this sounds like a regular 4T pixel sensor, may be fabricated on CCD fab in CCD-compatible process. Personally, I'm sceptical about Fairchild Imaging capabilities to deliver a real breakthrough here.

Update Feb 4, 2007: Fairchild Imaging published a paper on the hybrid imager approach. It's quite an exotic imager having CCD combined with column-parallel CMOS readout attached on indium bumps. The chip was developed under US Army contract. Quite an expensive technology, even for military.