Not really. This is a 3T pixel concept. Espros works on fully-depleted embedded CCD for an entirely different application. People concentrating on particle and soft xray detectors have for some time scouted for CMOS compatible ways to deplete high resistive epi and integrate readout monolithically. They were hopping from one European fab to the other (I believe also Espros) - Professor Wermes from Univ. Bonn e.g. was quite busy with this. Regarding the device concept itself; the detector guys were first in depleting silicon while integrating readout - check e.g. old papers from Prof. Etoh-san. And this superseded the drift detector and DEPFET technology triggered Europe (Gatti, Lutz...). Espros and others (imec, open university/e2v, shizuoka univ.) just picked this idea and implemented it for another application. Actually Prof. Etoh-san early on proposed to use this technology for ToF, but never seemed to cared much about realizing it as he's focusing on high-speed photography. The CTO of Espros (Martin Popp) actually comes from this particle detection background (check his dissertation) and probably got inspired by it and that's maybe the story of Espros. So in short - no it's a different device. Yes, there's similarity - but this is known since long and actually doesn't seem to originate from Espros. Who was first? Hard to say as start-ups are typically in stealth modes, where Professors have to publish... Would be interesting to have them comment...
Isn't this the same as Espros technology?
ReplyDeleteNot really. This is a 3T pixel concept. Espros works on fully-depleted embedded CCD for an entirely different application. People concentrating on particle and soft xray detectors have for some time scouted for CMOS compatible ways to deplete high resistive epi and integrate readout monolithically. They were hopping from one European fab to the other (I believe also Espros) - Professor Wermes from Univ. Bonn e.g. was quite busy with this. Regarding the device concept itself; the detector guys were first in depleting silicon while integrating readout - check e.g. old papers from Prof. Etoh-san. And this superseded the drift detector and DEPFET technology triggered Europe (Gatti, Lutz...). Espros and others (imec, open university/e2v, shizuoka univ.) just picked this idea and implemented it for another application. Actually Prof. Etoh-san early on proposed to use this technology for ToF, but never seemed to cared much about realizing it as he's focusing on high-speed photography. The CTO of Espros (Martin Popp) actually comes from this particle detection background (check his dissertation) and probably got inspired by it and that's maybe the story of Espros. So in short - no it's a different device. Yes, there's similarity - but this is known since long and actually doesn't seem to originate from Espros. Who was first? Hard to say as start-ups are typically in stealth modes, where Professors have to publish... Would be interesting to have them comment...
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