Thursday, February 15, 2018

ISSCC Review: Sony, TSMC, NHK, Toshiba, Microsoft, TU Delft, FBK

Albert Theuwissen continues his review of ISSCC 2018 presentations. The second part includes Sony 3.9MP, 1.5um pixel pitch event-driven sensor:

"The overall resolution of 3.9 Mpixels is reduced to on 16×5 macro pixels. In this “macro” pixel mode, the power consumption is drastically reduced as well, and the sensor behaves in a sort of sleeping mode. Once the sensor detects any motion in the image (by means of frame differencing), the device wakes up and switches to the full resolution mode."

TSMC presents their 13.5MP 1.1um pixel sensor and NHK unveils 8K 36MP 480fps sensor for slow-mo sports shooting at the oncoming Tokyo Olympics.

The third part of the review starts with Toshiba hybrid LiDAR that is enhanced by a Smart Accumulation Mode that, basically, tracks the subjects in depth domain. As long as it works, the detection range can reach 200m, but it relies on a lot of intelligence inside what is supposed to be just a dumb sensor delivering the "food for thought" to the main CPU or NPU.

Microsoft presented an evolution of its ToF sensor used in Kinect-2 - higher resolution, smaller pixels, BSI, higher QE, better shutter efficiency, etc. AGC has been added to the pixel, and background light suppression has been removed, if we compare this pixel with the previous Microsoft design.

TU Delft and FBK presented SPAD designs. The FBK one is aimed to entangled photon microscopy to increase the resolution by a factor of N, where N is the number of mutually entangled photons.

Albert Theuwissen concludes his review on an optimistic note:

"Take away message : everything goes faster, lower supply voltages, lower power consumption, stacking is becoming the key technology, and apparently, the end of the developments in our field is not yet near ! The future looks bright for the imaging engineers !!!"

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