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Wednesday, July 08, 2009

Image Sensor Creativity Award: Call for Nominations

Reading the comments questioning the merits of Kodak paper that won Walter Kosonocky Award, I thought about making an open vote on the best creative image sensor idea published in the last 2 years, starting from summer 2007 (what is called summer in the northern hemisphere). The type of publications is not limited - it can be IEEE/SPIE journals or conferences papers, IISW 2007 or 2009 presentations, patent applications, university theses, white papers, web articles or whatever else which has legible technical description of the idea. Self-nominations are welcomed too and should not be ashamed of.

Since the nomination and voting process is completely open, I hope there would be no complaints on merits and criteria.

I plan to collect the nominations after a week and put them into a poll list using Blogger vote gadget, something like on the picture below:



Multiple choices will be allowed, so if someone hesitates between two or three candidates, she/he can vote for all. One thing I worry of is that big organizations like Omnivision or Aptina can promote their papers over smaller players, such as Siliconfile or CMOSIS. My hope is that purely technical considerations would prevail over corporate solidarity.

OK, let's start. I will post my candidates in the comments below.
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1 comment:

  1. Vladimir KoifmanJuly 8, 2009 at 5:17 PM

    My candidate is Keith Fife's paper on multi-aperture imaging at ISSCC 2008:

    A 3MPixel Multi-Aperture Image Sensor with 0.7um Pixels in 0.11um CMOS

    K. Fife, A. El Gamal, H-S. Wong
    Stanford University, Stanford, CA

    A multi-aperture imager sensor is designed to reduce lens requirements, produce 3D maps and improve pixel-defect tolerance. It comprises a 166×76 array of 16×16 0.7um full-frame transfer CCD sub-arrays, a CMOS readout circuit and per-column 10b ADCs fabricated in a 0.11um CMOS process. Snap-shot image acquisition with CDS is performed at up to 15fps. The array has 0.15V/lx·s sensitivity, 3500e- full-well capacity, 5e- read noise, 25e-/s dark signal, 57dB DR and 35dB peak SNR.

    The paper opens an interesting possibility of utilizing of very small pixel size for something useful, other than just resolution increase. Even though there said to be some prior art as in US patent 6704043, I still believe the paper deserves the award.

    I might post more candidates as I think about it later in the week.

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