King Klon

Yole Developpement publishes its presentations at CIOE Photonics Executive Forums (requires free registration to download): " 3D sensing for consumer: the game changing interface " by Pierre Cambou " The automotive market will shape the future of LiDAR - The multi-billion dollars opportunity " by Guillaume Girardin " Uncooled IR imaging market perspectives " - written by Eric Mounier, presented by Guillaume Girardin Some interesting slides from the presentations:

poLight has completed a successful IPO at Oslo Stock Exchange on Oct. 1, 2018. The company has raised 130m NOK (about $15.5m).

Photonics Spectra publishes an article " Emerging Applications Drive Image Sensor Innovations " Hank Hogan. Few quotes: " Vendors are responding by increasing sensor spectral range, integrating new capabilities into devices, and adding features such as 3D imaging. The result can be rapid growth in sensors, even in areas that are relatively stable. For instance, the worldwide market for cars is expanding at a relatively modest pace, according to Geoff Ballew, senior director of marketing in the automotive sensing division of chipmaker ON Semiconductor Corp. of Phoenix. However, tepid growth is not the case for the automotive imaging solutions. “The number of sensors consumed and attached to those cars is growing wildly,” he said. “The image sensor chip business is growing in excess of 15 to 20 percent a year. The reason for that is cameras increasingly are adding new functionality to cars.” Automotive sensors are expected to work from -40 to 125 °C. That interacts with th

San Diego-based image sensor distributor AlliedSens reveals that Brookman 1.3MP BT130C and 2MP BT200C are used in Japanese color night vision cameras, such as this one . Here is Flovel camera with Brookman sensor:

KB ViTA kindly sent me an info about their latest LWIR camera that senses polarization: " It all was started with the fact KB ViTA has developed a very sensitive thermal imaging module VLM640, which had a sensitivity of at least 20 mK in 8 — 12 µm band. The sensor manufacturer turned to KB ViTA and offered an engineering sample from an experimental wafer of bolometric detectors with integrated polarization filters. For KB ViTA it was honorable but, at the same time, there was no understanding of what it is expected to ultimately obtain. The technology and the very idea of seeing the own polarization of the thermal photons of objects that surround us is absolutely new and hardly anyone has experience of processing such information. Below we will show you how the polarization in the IR spectrum looks. There were a polarizing sensor and electronics from VLM640 camera with 20 mK sensitivity. The interesting thing about the sensor is each pixel in the group of four is covered with a p

James Hughes and Yash Gupta from UCSC present their idea of Gigabit random number generator for cryptography:

Science Magazine publishes a paper on wideband light sensing device " Ultrabroadband photosensitivity from visible to terahertz at room temperature " by Dong Wu, Yongchang Ma, Yingying Niu, Qiaomei Liu, Tao Dong, Sijie Zhang, Jiasen Niu, Huibin Zhou, Jian Wei, Yingxin Wang, Ziran Zhao, and Nanlin Wang from Peking University, Tianjin University of Technology, and Tsinghua University, China. " Charge density wave (CDW) is one of the most fundamental quantum phenomena in solids. Different from ordinary metals in which only single-particle excitations exist, CDW also has collective excitations and can carry electric current in a collective fashion. Manipulating this collective condensation for applications has long been a goal in the condensed matter and materials community. We show that the CDW system of 1T-TaS2 is highly sensitive to light directly from visible down to terahertz, with current responsivities on the order of ~1 AW−1 at room temperature. Our findings open a n

Espros September 2018 Newsletter announces that the company has signed a contract with Hypersen Technologies (Shenzhen) Co. to supply them with a mass delivery of the TOF epc635 imagers. The epc635 sensors run Hypersen's recently launched solid-state LiDAR (HPS-3D Series). Other Espros partners in China are Benewake (Beijing) and Shanghai Data Miracle Co. Another notable quote from the Newsletter: " By the way, the most dominant cost drivers in TOF cameras are the receiver lens and the illumination. The TOF camera chip typically ranks as third. Hence a very sensitive TOF imager allows cost reduction due to less spending on illumination. What's more, the camera will not heat up as much, increasing lifetime and reducing power consumption. " Update: The post has been corrected according to the additional Espros explanations. Espros is supplying the ToF sensors to Hypersenm, not outsourcing the production.

Ars Technica : Following a complaint by Eric Swildens, the USPTO has rejected all but three of 56 claims in Waymo's US9368936 patent . The USPTO found that some claims replicated technology described in an earlier patent from Velodyne, while another claim was simply "impossible" and "magic." " The patent shouldn't have been filed in the first place, " Swildens said. " It's a very well written patent. However, my personal belief is that the thing that they say they invented, they didn't invent. " The 936 patent played a key role in last year's lawsuit with Uber. In December 2016, a Waymo engineer was inadvertently copied on an email from one of its suppliers to Uber, showing a LiDAR circuit design that looked almost identical to the one shown in the 936 patent: Swildens said to Wired in 2017 : " I couldn't imagine the circuit didn't exist prior to this patent. " He then spent $6,000 of his own money to launch

Teledyne e2v announces that samples are now available for Emerald 8M9 , the newest member of the Emerald CMOS sensor family dedicated to machine vision and Intelligent Traffic System (ITS) applications. Emerald 8M9 features a 2.8µm global shutter pixel and provides a 8.9MP resolution in a 2/3-inch optical format. The sensor is available in two speed grades: a standard speed model (47fps @10bits) and a high speed model (107fps @10bits). The new sensor has a readout noise of 2.8e- combined with 65% QE. Vincent Richard, Marketing Manager at Teledyne e2v, said “ Emerald 8M9 is designed specifically to address the demands of machine vision, high resolution surveillance and traffic intelligence. The sensor is unmatched in the industry because of its versatile feature set. For example, real-time High Dynamic Range mode allows high resolution capture of fast moving situations from daylight to night-time with minimum artefacts and blur effects. “ Samples and demo kits are now available and mas

Wired , Verge , Axios : Mountain View, CA-based automotive LiDAR startup Aeva demos its coherent LiDAR prototype and announces $45m round A financing. The company was founded by two ex-Apple engineers in 2017. Not much is said about the technology side: The LiDAR is able to measure Doppler shift with a few cm/s accuracy Its range is 200m The power consumption is less than 100W No mechanical scanning Also has a camera functionality Costs in a range of few hundred dollars “ We’re focused on delivering things now, ” says Aeva cofounder Mina Rezk. “ This is an architecture that we put together, that we know we can manufacture.” That means no exotic materials and using components that are well established and easy to acquire. "

Taiwan-based Artilux' paper " Proposal and demonstration of lock-in pixels for indirect time-of-flight measurements based on germanium-on-silicon technology " by N. Na, S.-L. Cheng, H.-D. Liu, M.-J. Yang, C.-Y. Chen, H.-W. Chen, Y.-T. Chou, C.-T. Lin, W.-H. Liu, C.-F. Liang, C.-L. Chen, S.-W. Chu, B.-J. Chen, Y.-F. Lyu, and S.-L. Chen unveils the company plans to work with TSMC on Ge-on-Si pixel: " We propose the use of germanium-on-silicon technology for indirect time-of-flight depth sensing as well as three-dimensional imaging applications, and demonstrate a novel pixel featuring a high quantum efficiency and a large frequency bandwidth. Compared to conventional silicon pixels, our germanium-on-silicon pixels simultaneously maintain a high quantum efficiency and a high demodulation contrast deep into GHz frequency regime, which enable consistently superior depth accuracy in both indoor and outdoor scenarios. Device simulation, system performance comparison, and el

Valeo shows how inside car cameras can be useful in various scenarios:

IEDM 2018 to be held on Dec. 1-5 in San Francisco publishes a list of accepted papers with an interesting image sensor stuff: High Performance 2.5um Global Shutter Pixel with New Designed Light-Pipe Structure Toshifumi Yokoyama, TowerJazz Panasonic Semiconductor Co. Back-Illuminated 2.74 μm-Pixel-Pitch Global Shutter CMOS Image Sensor with Charge-Domain Memory Achieving 10k e- Saturation Signal Yoshimichi Kumagai, Sony Semiconductor A 0.68e-rms Random-Noise 121dB Dynamic-Range Sub-pixel architecture CMOS Image Sensor with LED Flicker Mitigation Satoko Iida, Sony Semiconductor A 24.3Me- Full Well Capacity CMOS Image Sensor with Lateral Overflow Integration Trench Capacitor for High Precision Near Infrared Absorption Imaging Maasa Murata, Tohoku University A HDR 98dB 3.2µm Charge Domain Global Shutter CMOS Image Sensor Arnaud Tournier, STMicroelectronics 1.5µm dual conversion gain, backside illuminated image sensor using stacked pixel level connections with 13ke- full-well capacitance a