Chipworks Converses with Primesense

Chipworks' Jim Morrison met with Primesense representatives at CES 2010 and published his conversation in the company blog:

"I just had a great interview with Shlomo Zippel, Applications and User Experience Engineer ... and Iris Finkelstein, Director of Marketing at PrimeSense....

Some background: PrimeSense has grown from 30 employees to 140 employees in three years. They doubled over the last year with the release of the Microsoft Kinect.

...Back a few years ago they considered the Time of Flight technology, but realized that the there was not a roadmap to reduce the cost of the sensors. So they turned to what they offer now, the IR LED and the standard VGA CIS ...from Micron / Aptina. This was far cheaper as CIS devices had already been scaled up in wafer size and adopted in every camera phone, so the cost per chip for them was next to nothing. They were able to keep the BOM for the cameras cheap and focus on the image processing ASIC.

PrimeSense sees gesture recognition as the future of home controls for things like heating and ventilation or lighting. They see a lower horsepower image processing engine needed to process a lower resolution image. By projecting fewer IR points into the room, they drop the resolution. But to recognize a simple on/off, raise/lower, gesture you do not need so much image processing horsepower. So the BOM for a home control system becomes very simple and cheap; an IR LED, a VGA CIS and a low end image processing engine."

Meanwhile, Microsoft Kinect won CES Best of Innovation Award 2011 in Electronic Gaming Hardware category.