During the last two weeks I was not able to spend enough time preparing a new technical blog about the continuing story of the PTC. The reason is very simple : a trip to Brazil kept me busy.
I was invited by prof. Jose Gabriel Rodriguez Carneiro Gomes (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, UFRJ) and prof. Davies William de Lima Monteiro (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, UFMG) to give a talk in order to promote solid-state imaging technology in Brazil. The workshops were organized in close cooperation with the local IEEE Chapter on Circuits & Systems.
At this moment the overall semiconductor activities in Brazil are continuously growing, but there is still very limited work going on in the field of imagers. A few start-up companies are doing quite nice work, but they do not (yet) reach the level of the companies present in North America, Europe or the Far East. So it was a great initiative of prof. Gomes and prof. de Lima Monteiro to promote image sensors in front of an audience composed out of undergraduate students, graduate students, professors and people from industry. If the R&D work on image sensors gets more attention, it will be easier to get funding from the government for future projects. And this holds for academic work as well as for industrial activities.
My talk was split into two parts (each part lasted for 2 hours) :
– “CMOS Image Sensors : Past, Present and Future”. The content of this session was based a short historical background, a brief overview of the state-of-the-art and focused mainly on future challenges of CMOS imaging. If pixels get smaller and/or if more pixels are put on a sensor, the overall speed of the sensor will go down (in frames/s), the dynamic range will lower, the light sensitivity will decrease, and ultimately the signal-to-noise will deteriorate. The talk gave an overview of the few techniques that can be used to increase the speed, to create a wide dynamic range, to increase the light sensitivity (by means of back-side illumination) and to optimize the signal-to-noise ratio (by means of pixel binning),
– “Colour Processing”. In a talk of 2 hours it is pretty difficult to give a detailed overview of the complete signal processing present in a digital camera. For that reason the content of the presentation was limited to the following subjects : short overview of colour imaging, auto-white balance, colour matrixing and demosaicing.
Other speakers in the workshop were Simon Schneiter (talked about 3D Imaging) and Carlos Mendoza (talked about Smart Vision Systems). Each workshop was attended by about 100 participants. Based on the reaction after the workshops, the talks were very well received by the audience. Hopefully the participants were convinced that imaging in general is a great field to work in. If so, then more students might be attracted by the subject of solid-state imaging, and it can be a great stimulation to submit more projects. In the end more projects will be granted, and that was the original goal of the bringing all these people together.
My first visit to Brazil was possible thanks to this great initiative taken by prof. Gomes and prof. de Lima Monteiro. Thanks to them for inviting me this opportunity to promote digital imaging and congratulation for the perfect organization of the workshops !
Albert 01-12-2009.