Yesterday I quickly visited the Vision 2012 show in Stuttgart. The buzz words at the show were 3D cameras, high speed, USB3.0. On sensor level, there were four items that really impressed me :
– A curved CCD sensor at the booth of Andanta. There were already rumours that people are working on curved sensors and I was contacted a few years ago to prepare an R&D proposal for curved sensors. But now it is the first time that I saw one. The sensor was bent in two (!) directions with a curvature radius of 500 mm. The device has 16 M pixels, with a size of 6 cm x 6 cm. The packaged device was mounted on a PCB, but no working devices were shown,
– A 300 mm wafer with full-size CMOS imagers (36 mm x 24 mm) at the booth of CMOSIS. They displayed a complete 300 mm wafer with the sensor that is fabricated for the Leica M-camera. Taking into account that I started my career with wafers of 50 mm ( 2 inches) diameter ….,
– A global shutter HDR sensor at the booth of New Imaging Technology. Knowing their pixel architecture I think it is a major achievement to incorporate a global shutter mode in the sensor. NIT had a working camera to show to the visitors,
– Another remarkable observation : when passing by the booth of Kappa, my eyes caught an older gentleman who was explaining the product portfolio of Kappa. He had a CCD attached to the collar of his jacket, and I immediately recognized the device. Maybe I am the only one at the whole Vision show that has some connections to it : it was an NXA1011 of Philips, the one I designed in 1983 when I started working at Philips Research. This imaging world is really a small world !
Albert, 7 November 2012.