Tsutomu Haruta (Sony) discussed “A brief history of image sensor design and development”. Main focus was the recently developed 16 Mpixel BSI-CMOS with 1.12 um pixels and a 2 x 4 sharing concept. This sensor is the very first one by Sony with such a complex sharing pixel architecture. On the average, the pixel has 1.375 T/pixel.
Another new SNR parameter was introduced : SNR per unit area : 20 lux, F2.8, 66.7 ms exposure time, SNR = 19 dB per unit cell and SNR = 21 dB per unit area. By means of the SNR per unit area, it could be shown that the new 1.12 um technology is performing at least in the same way as the 1.40 um pixel. But because of the size reduction of the pixel, the SNR is going down by 2 dB.
Haruta showed that the speed of the CMOS image sensors is increasing by a factor 2 every 3 years, and this will continue for the coming generations of sensors. But on the other hand, the power dissipation for CMOS imaging systems in mobile imaging cannot go higher than 300 mW. So this is an interesting challenge. It was not mentioned how Sony will solve this problem …
Albert, 23-03-2011