Up to now, there was very little known about Rosnes, a Japan-based stealth-mode image sensor start-up company. The first five published patent applications reveal a bit of info about the direction the company is taking:
SOLID-STATE IMAGE PICKUP DEVICE by YAMAGUCHI TAKUMI
JP2008270423, published 2008-11-06
SOLID-STATE IMAGE PICKUP DEVICE by YAMAGUCHI TAKUMI
JP2008270381, published 2008-11-06
SOLID STATE IMAGING DEVICE by YAMAGUCHI TAKUMI and OHTA SOUGO
WO2008133146, published 2008-11-06
SOLID STATE IMAGING DEVICE by YAMAGUCHI TAKUMI and IWASAWA TAKAHIRO
WO2008133145, published 2008-11-06
SOLID STATE IMAGING DEVICE by TERAKAWA SUMIO
WO2008133144, published 2008-11-06
The patents talk about some incremental pixel improvements. I'm unable to read Japanese, but many of the improvements seem to have prior art to me. One of them, WO2008133144, talks about using p-type substrate with n-type epi:
Another application, WO2008133145, depicts 8-way shared 4T pixel:
Wow, funny - Rosnes is sensor backwards.
ReplyDeleteAll of these people seem to be from the sensor group at Matsushita electric. In fact these filings seem to overlap filings some of these guys made while they were still at Matsushita.
Anybody at Matsushita want to tell us what happened?