Yesterday the International Image Sensor Workshop kicked off in Snowbird, Utah, USA. 150 happy faces in the early morning, 150 tired faces in the evening. The amount of information presented on the first day was already enormous ! Besides the several presentations (of max. 15 min) we also got the first 20 flash presentations (3 min) that accompany the poster session. It is really impossible to give an overview of all papers in this blog.
The content of the presentation on the first day showed a lot of variety : from reverse engineering, over fabrication technology, to noise analysis, and implementation of new architectures. In general the papers are of very high quality (we do not expect anything else from this workshop !).
The first paper in the workshop was one from Chipworks, showing us some interesting reversed-engieered details of the imagers that normally are not being disclosed by the manufacturers. Estonishing how the sensors becoming masterpieces of 3D integration if one simply looks to the optical parts on top of the pixels.
Pixels are going towards the next generation, below 1 um. The amount of effort, the amount of innovation that goes into these developments can only be underestimated. A couple of papers highlighted a few details of how to lower the optical stack, how to lower the optical cross talk, how to increase the full well capacity. Actually if it comes down to specifications, the history is simply repeating itself already since decades : lower noise, higher sensitivity, etc. But the “tricks” applied to maintain or improve the performance constantly change of course.
Interesting, but also new to the workshop (we did not had these papers for several years), were several papers on technology, including the developments of different lithographic tools dedicated for image sensors and BSI, gettering methods, molecular beam epitaxy, fully organic imagers which are flexible, etc. A complete session was devoted to noise. Including modelling of the noise, reduction of the noise by means of process adaptation and optimization, and engineering white blemishes.
Albert, 14-06-2013.