Altera, Apical, AltaSens Jointly Develop WDR Chipset

PR Newswire: The WDR chipset combines an Altera Cyclone IV E FPGA with a security chip that supports Apical's HD WDR full ISP pipeline IP and AltaSens' 1080p60 A3372E3-4T image sensor. Apical's HD HDR full image signal pipeline IP is optimized to take advantage of the capabilities of the Altera FPGA. No other application ASSP or DSP platform is said to offer WDR technology using a 1080p60 sensor and a comprehensive datapath (a full HD raster is 2200x1125 pixels x 16+ bits per pixel x 60 frames per second, resulting in >2 Gbps bandwidth). The solution offers:

• Hot pixel removal and noise reduction (spatial and temporal IP cores are available)
• Advanced per pixel tone mapping (Apical's patented Iridix IP core)
• Advanced demosaic and color correction

TowerJazz Buys Micron's Fab in Japan

I haven't seen the official PR yet, but Reuters, Globes, EETimes, and many other sources report that TowerJazz is to acquire Micron's fab in in Nishiwaki City, Japan for $140M in cash and stock transaction ($40M cash plus common stock plus some liabilities). The Micron facility is said to help TowerJazz target Japanese camera companies.

"We will be able to acquire some very good camera companies as end users," Russell Ellwanger, TowerJazz CEO, told Reuters. "We haven't been able to make progress with high-end camera users and having a presence in Japan opens up that opportunity for us." So far Japan only accounts for half a percent of TowerJazz' output.

The proposed purchase of the plant, located 600 km south of Tokyo, would increase TowerJazz production by 80 percent, or 60,000 wafers per month. The facility is said to have not been affected by the earthquake and tsunami in Japan last month.

Update: The official PR at Business Wire says that the Micron's facility can support geometries down to 95nm.

Anteryon Wafer Level Optics Presentation

Anteryon presented its wafer level optics solutions at Fotonica Evenement 2011 on March 30. The slides from "WaferOptics Mass Volume Production & Reliability" presentation speak for themselves:

Update: Anteryon asked me to remove the slides for two reasons:

1. The slides contain some internal information that the company prefers not to see in public access
2. The subset of slides I've happened to chose from the presentation seems to misrepresent the company's work.

Anterion may opt to send me other slides which the company feels more comfortable to publish.

PTC and QE Tutorial

Albert Theuwissen continues his series of PTC tutorials, now talking about QE, PRNU, FPN and their influence on QE measurements.

Lattice Announced HiSPi to Parallel Bridge

Market Wire: Lattice announced Aptina's High-Speed Serial Pixel Interface (HiSPi) to parallel bridge using LatticeXP2 FPGAs. The bridge allows any ISP with a traditional CMOS parallel bus to interface with an Aptina HiSPi CMOS sensor. This HiSPi bridge solution is aimed to security cameras, automotive applications, high end consumer cameras and other camera applications where the use of higher resolution and higher frame rate CMOS sensors is desirable.

Different Ways to View This Blog

Google Blogspot is experimenting with new dynamic templates having infinite scrolling, interactive layouts and downloading images as you view them. I'm not sure these layouts are any better than the current one, you can test them by yourselves:

Flipcard
Mosaic
Sidebar
Snapshot
Timeslide

April Fools' Gmail Motion

Google April Fools' Gmail Motion announcement was quite nice. While not directly image sensor related, it parodies fashionable gesture recognition projects:

Hynix Update: 1.4um, 1.1um Pixel Sampling

March Hynix Newsletter reveals recent Hynix advances in small pixel design: 2.0um and 1.75um pixels are in mass production now, 1.4um is at customer samples stage, 1.1um is to reach engineering sampling phase in April:

The full sensor line-up is shown in the new Q2 2011 Hynix catalog. Hynix says it aims to capture 20% of CIS market by leveraging its manufacturing strength in memory and a customer support system for the China market.

Omnivision Acquires 850 Kodak Patents for $65M

PR Newswire: OmniVision announced the purchase of approximately 850 image sensor-related patents and patent applications from Eastman Kodak for $65.0 million in a cash transaction. The transaction was completed on March 31, 2011.

"We are pleased with the opportunity to double the size of our intellectual property portfolio for CMOS image sensors," said Shaw Hong, CEO of OmniVision.

The purchased patent portfolio comprises approximately 850 U.S. and foreign patents and patent applications. The intellectual property includes numerous granted patents of key CMOS technologies covering early and fundamental CMOS image sensor work; improvements on foundational architectures, including new features and functions; and next generation performance improvements, miniaturization and cost reduction technologies.

Sue-Me Announces BIS Sensor

Adorama News: A dramatic advance in image sensor technology has been announced by Sue-Me corporation. The company's new sensors feature Backside Irrigated Sensors (BS) with backside liquid cooling, which they claim can take perfectly clear, detailed and accurate photos in complete darkness, with an ISO range from 100 to 1,000,000,080. A low-light test photo captured by BS Sensor pre-production camera: