Skip to main content

TechInsights: Apple Increases Number of PDAF Pixels in New iPhones

TechInsights teardown of iPhone Xs reveals that:

"Our early camera teardown effort has been focused on the 12 MP resolution wide-angle camera, promoted as a new, larger sensor with bigger, deeper pixels. The iPhone XS Max wide-angle camera chip is a stacked imager sourced from Sony and features a 7.01 mm x 5.79 mm (40.6 mm2) die size. This compares to 5.21 mm x 6.29 mm (32.8 mm2) for the iPhone 8/X wide-angle camera chips.

We confirmed the iPhone XS Max’s wide-angle camera pixel pitch of 1.4 µm (up from 1.22 µm) and immediately noticed the increased density of Focus Pixels compared to last year’s iPhone 8/X. The term Focus Pixels is Apple’s branding of masked phase detection autofocus (PDAF) pixels and the higher Focus Pixel count translates to more regions available as autofocus points. Focus Pixels were introduced in 2014 for iPhone 6 and at that time featured left and right-masked Focus Pixel pairs. In 2017 Apple moved from a paired to shared Focus Pixel strategy, where top/bottom masked pixels were added and all were evenly distributed within selected rows/columns. Apple has implemented all of its wide-angle Focus Pixels in the green channel."

12 MP wide-angle camera image sensor die with removed CFA

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Film-Based Light Sensing Review

University of Toronto repo publishes a Nature paper from January 2017 "Solution-processed semiconductors for next-generation photodetectors" by F. Pelayo García de Arquer, Ardalan Armin, Paul Meredith, and Edward H. Sargent. " Efficient light detection is central to modern science and technology. Current photodetectors mainly use photodiodes based on crystalline inorganic elemental semiconductors, such as silicon, or compounds such as III–V semiconductors. Photodetectors made of solution-processed semiconductors — which include organic materials, metal-halide perovskites and quantum dots — have recently emerged as candidates for next-generation light sensing. They combine ease of processing, tailorable optoelectronic properties, facile integration with complementary metal–oxide–semiconductors, compatibility with flexible substrates and good performance. Here, we review the recent advances and the open challenges in the field of solution-processed photodetectors, examin...
Post a Comment
Read more

Synaptics Under-Display Fingerprint Scanner Reverse Engineering

SystemPlus Consulting publishes a reverse engineering report of Synaptics’ under-display fingerprint scanner found inside the VIVO X21 UD Smartphone: " This scanner uses optical fingerprint technology that allows integration under the display. With a stainless steel support and two flexible printed circuit layers, the Synaptics fingerprint sensor’s dimensions are 6.46 mm x 9.09 mm, with an application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) driver in the flex module. This image sensor is also assembled with a glass substrate where filters are deposited. The sensor has a resolution of 30,625 pixels, with a pixel density of 777ppi. The module’s light source is providing by the OLED display glasses. The fingerprint module uses a collimator layer corresponding to the layers directly deposited on the die sensor and composed of organic, metallic and silicon layers. This only allows light rays reflected at normal incidence to the collimator filter layer to pass through and reach the optical ...
Post a Comment
Read more

LED Flicker Tutorial Paper

IE 2008 publishes a paper " LED flicker: Root cause, impact and measurement for automotive imaging applications " by Brian Deegan, Valeo Vision Systems. " In recent years, the use of LED lighting has become widespread in the automotive environment, largely because of their high energy efficiency, reliability, and low maintenance costs. There has also been a concurrent increase in the use and complexity of automotive camera systems. To a large extent, LED lighting and automotive camera technology evolved separately and independently. As the use of both technologies has increased, it has become clear that LED lighting poses significant challenges for automotive imaging i.e. so-called "LED flicker". LED flicker is an artifact observed in digital imaging where an imaged light source appears to flicker, even though the light source appears constant to a human observer. This paper defines the root cause and manifestations of LED flicker. It defines the use cases wher...
Post a Comment
Read more