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Tuesday, March 11, 2008

OptiML UFL from Tessera Improves Low Light Imaging

Yahoo: Tessera announced OptiML UFL technology, now avaliable for licensing. It's claimed to improve low-light performance of a camera module by increasing the amount of available light by as much as 250%, without degrading the field depth or other performance factors.

OptiML UFL uses a combination of advanced lens design and embedded processing technology. It has a unique fast lens design, which enables an F number that is significantly lower than a standard lens, without sacrificing the camera module’s close-range focus capability. This greatly improves indoor image capture where low-light situations generally occur.

From the PR it looks like OptiML UFL is based on Tessera EDoF technology, but the depth of focus enhancement is traded for an increased F number.

2 comments:

  1. can current sensors technology handle F/# lower than 2.0? From the PR it seems the target is F/1.75 lens. But this has many implicatios including a wide light cone diameter.

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  2. Good question. First, I'm not sure Tessera's target is F/1.75. If it chooses F/3.3 as a reference, its UFL lens might have F/2.0 or so.

    As for modern sensors benefiting from lower F/#, the pixel signal grows somewhat, less than 250%, I believe. But color crosstalk gets bigger as well. Depending on the lens telecentricity, shading in the corners might become larger. Then Tessera's embedded processing algorithms might eat part of the SNR improvement.

    All in all, I think there would be some advantage using Tessera UFL, but much less than 250%.

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