Sorry I could not report earlier, but my set of proceedings with hand-written notes is still in my lugage, which is lost by this wonderful airline, called DELTA ….
What I do remember of the third day (based on looking through the program), it was again a long day with a superb end :
– there are still a few “pure CCD” developments announced, but the trend year after year is to see and get less and less “pure CCD” improvements. CCD research in a 100 % CCD process is really becoming an exception. CCD advances were announced by TeledyneDALSA and LBNL Berkeley,
– in contradiction to the previous statement, there were 3 “embedded CCDs in CMOS” reported by the following companies/institutes ” imec, TowerJazz (in cooperation with STFC Rutherford) and Espros, so is a pure CMOS device becoming a dinosaur as well ?
– first technical results and progress was reported about the quanta imager researched at Dartmouth and at Rambus. If I remember well, the first time the quanta device (at that time still called jot) was announced was at IISW2005,
– further improvements on organic CMOS was shown by Fujifilm in cooperation with Panasonic,
– also remarkable was the announcement of a research cooperation between Panasonic and imec, illustrated by a 4k2k 60-fps imager with a stagger-laced dual-exposure technique,
– two large areas devices were presented that can be found back in today’s DSLR products : one by Aptina (10.8 Mpixels, 1-inch format) and one by CMOSIS (24 Mpixel, 36 mm x 24 mm),
– during the ToF session, major attention was paid on the issue of cancelling the background illumination,
– hard to imagine, but the magic barrier of 1 Gfps seems to come closer and closer : two solutions were introduced, one in CMOS technology, the other one in a combined CCD-CMOS technology.
At the end of day 3, we had an invited talk by Mike Tompsett, for me (and many more) one of the highlights of the workshop 2013. Mike explained the hieararchical structure at Bell Labs at the time of the invention of the CCD, and it turned out that in 2009, OR the right people got the Noble Prize for the wrong invention, OR the wrong people got the Noble Prize for the right invention. The Noble Prize Committee gave out the Noble Prize for the Invention of the CCD Image Sensor. But the one who owns the patent with the same title is Mike Tompsett, and not his manager of his upper-management. In his explanation about the history of the invention of the CCD imager, Mike also included the important contribution of Gene Weckler and Peter Noble. Without their pioneering work in imaging there would never had been a CCD image sensor. A very impressive talk by the inventor of the CCD image sensor. BTW Mike authographed my copy of his book “Charge Transfer Devices”, which I bought in 1979.
On Saturday night we had the traditional banquet with announcements and awards. The first (IISS) Exceptional Lifetime Achievement Award was handed out to Gene Weckler. Gene, almost 81 years old (or young ?), gave an overview of his imaging carreer. He started somewhere in the ’60s with imaging, and ended in 2009, including the start-up of two companies. Gene is one of these giant, on whose shoulders we all are standing now.
Albert, 19 June 2013.