Another year passed by, and what a kind of year ? No travel, no face-to-face meetings, no in-person conference or workshops, all gatherings on-line. But nevertheless we survived, actually we had to make use of the technology we all helped to develop ourselves. At least now I can show to my grandchildren when they follow on-line teaching what the result is of the work grand-daddy is doing. “Every disadvantage has it own advantage”, is a famous saying in our language.
Also in 2021 Harvest Imaging delivered several public as well as in-house trainings. Amazing was to experience that the USA discovered the trainings by the fact that now everything is delivered on-line. I never had that many customers from overseas as in 2021. Some classes were running till late at night to accomodate the time difference between the West Coast of the USA and Europe. After the USA I expected that something similar would happen to potential customers in the Far East, but that did not happen (yet). Also the training agenda for 2022 is again nicely filling up, mainly with in-house or tailored courses. Next to the regular trainings, I also started with a series of videos, accessable through a video-on-demand tool. Unique to this video-on-demand is a kind of follw-up in Q&A sessions.
My activities at the Delft University of Technology slowed down, my contract was adapted to 1 day/week. At this moment still 1 PhD candidate is working on a high-speed CMOS image sensor, as well as 2 MSc student. It is still fun to work with these young people, although also in this part of my work Covid is hampering the progress and the personal contact with the students. Besides the academic work in Delft, I am still working on “private” technical projects as well. The “Reproducibily, Variability and Reliability of CIS” project, started in 2017, was finished in 2021 and all reports are sent out to all customers who bought the reports. Next I started a project on “Angular Dependency and Parasitic Light Sensitivity”. Two papers are written (almost ready) to share the technical content of the findings. The material is submitted to be published in a special issue on Image Sensors (IEEE-ED), scheduled in 2022. Talking about publications : also in 2021 a booklet was finished that I wrote together with Guy Meynants about Single-Slope ADCs for Image Sensors. In the past Guy and myself were competitors in the imaging business, these days we are colleagues : Guy at the University of Leuven, and myself at the Delft University of Technology. Bringing these two worlds together was quite encouraging. Working through the busy agendas of Guy and myself resulted in the aforementioned booklet. We made an agreement to start writing another booklet about a CIS related topic, but both of us have a common issue : lack of time.
Another great publication, maybe the biggest of all I ever wrote in my entire career, was the plenary talk/paper at the ISSCC2021. Too bad that the conference had to go on-line as well. Nevertheless, my presentation was pre-recorded and after the ISSCC2021 the video was uploaded on YouTube. Together with the number of views on the IEEE website, a total of over 5000 people watched the presentation. This is considered as a quite high number for a technical talk.
In 2021 the International Image Sensor Workshop was scheduled to take place in Europe, but due to the well-known reasons, also the IISW2021 was organized as a virtual event. Johannes and Vladimir acted as the general chairs of the workshop, Guy took on the role of Technical Progam Chair. This EU-team did a great job in organizing a smooth workshop with over 500 registrants and about 100 presentations. It is really very rewarding to see that the “youngsters” can take over the work in organizing and running the IISW. Hopefully the pandemic will be gone before the next workshop, the plan is to have in 2023 IISW as an in-person event, again in Europe. After IISW2021 also my position as president of IISS came to an end, Junichi Nakamura took over my duties.
Then there is one question left : what will 2022 bring ? Well I think in the first place more of the same as in 2021. The plans made a couple of years ago for a Summer School are now (definitely) buried because of Covid. Unfortunately the Harvest Imaging Forum 2021 also had to be postponed and is now scheduled for June 2022. It is not yet clear whether the real 2022 forum will be scheduled for December 2022 or whether the forum will definitely move to a June timeframe. Also plans are in development to do new and more measurements on CIS at different temperatures. “Never a dull moment in imaging !”.
Looking forward to “see” you in 2022, through the website or by means of the Harvest Imaging Newsletter.
Stay Healthy and Happy New Year,
Albert.
24/12/2021.