Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

Good Bye 2015 ! 

At the very end of 2015, it is good to take a look backwards to see what 2015 has brought.

Actually I can start with the same statement as last year : “It was a busy year for Harvest Imaging”.  Several imaging trainings were organized, in-house as well as public courses.  Thanks to CEI, FSRM and Framos who organized the public or open courses.  Thanks to all my customers for the in-house courses.   Thanks to all participants for being there, because without participants there will be no trainings !  And apparently the imaging business is doing very well, because a lot of companies have hired new imaging engineers and consequently they are again asking for more trainings in 2016.  That is of course the best feedback I can get : returning customers. 

The Harvest Imaging Forum 2015 was targeting “3D Imaging with ToF”.  I was very happy to get the possibility to attract David Stoppa as the speaker for this forum.  The two sessions in December got very good feedback from the participants, and in January 2016 a third (and last) session will be organized.  The only drawback : the expectations for the third session are high, so David knows what to do.  At this moment I can announce already that also n 2016 another Harvest Imaging forum will be organized.  Topic and speaker(s) are still to be defined.

In 2015 Harvest Imaging came with a new product on the market : a reverse engineering report of a particular imaging feature present in a commercial camera.  The first reverse engineering report was devoted to Phase Detection Auto-Focus Pixels.  This is a very interesting topic, very well described in patents of several Japanese camera manufacturers, but the technical results obtained by these PDAF pixels are hardly described in public literature.  For that reason Harvest Imaging started working on it.  At the end of the road, a nice report is ready and is for sale.  And one of the conclusions is that it took more time and effort than originally planned.  (This is in line with the 3rd law of Hofstadter : A project always takes longer than originally scheduled, even if you take the 3rd law of Hofstadter into account).  But it still was worthwhile doing it.  We learned a lot from the PDAF measurements.  And if a “good” subject pops up in 2016, a new reverse engineering effort will start.

If I look back to the activities that took place in relation to the imaging society (IISS), then Harvest Imaging took a very active role in the organization of the 2015 International Image Sensor Workshop.  In close cooperation with imaging peers (Johannes Solhusvik and Pierre Magnan) a successful workshop was organized.   About 100 technical papers were presented during almost 4 days.  But also remarkable : during the social activity of the workshop, all 180 participants went out for biking in an old cave.  Their reactions afterwards were quite interesting : most of them enjoyed it very much, a few much less.

As you can read, 2015 was very busy and was interesting because it was so diverse.  I do hope that the customers of Harvest Imaging can close 2015 with a big smile on their face.  I would to thank all of them for the business in 2015 and I am looking forward to serve them again in 2016.

Welcome 2016 !  Looking forward to another successful year, although without an IISW, but with a new special issue of IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices on Image Sensors coming up !

Wishing all my readers a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.  “See” you soon.

Albert, 23-12-2015.

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