Assorted News: Omnivision, Sony, ASE, MISIS, Caeleste

Yuanchuang: Omnivision reports that testing, packaging, and known good wafer reconstruction expenses constitute 9.74% of its image sensor cost.

Digitimes: Sony has added ASE to its backend for automotive CIS supply chain. ASE will set up a new business unit to handle Sony's CIS orders. ASE reportedly has become Sony's second backend partner for processing automotive image sensors, marking its return to the CIS packaging segment following years of hiatus.

PRNewswire: Russian scientists from NUST MISIS National Technological Initiative Center "Quantum Communications" are developing what they call the world's first prototype of an infrared single-photon video detector.

"The detector itself is located inside the cryostat at a temperature of only 2 K, which is close to absolute zero. When a photon is detected, it sends a signal to the processing circuit, and an image appears on the display", comments Grigory Goltsman, Chief Researcher at NUST MISIS NTI Center "Quantum Communications", founder of "Skontel" company.

Caeleste: Bart Dierickx (Co-Founder and CTO) and Ajit Kalgi (Senior Analog Designer) invented a method to increase the charge collection, thus image lag, of a very long narrow photodiode. The N-type pinned photodiode (PPD) itself is constant in width and homogenous in concentration. It is squeezed between two P+ regions, that are at variable distance from the photodiode (Figure 1).

The presence of the P+ region affects the potential in the photodiode, and the construction is so that the potential drops evenly and monotonically, so as to have an effective electric filed in the photodiode that collects the charges (Figure 2).