Over the last two days, IMS Fraunhofer organized their bi-yearly CMOS imager workshop. The workshop was attended by (about) 90 people I guess. Presentations were done by invitation only. It was already the sixth time this workshop took place, always in a very good atmosphere and always accompanied by an excellent workshop dinner on the first night.
Of course the most important part are the presentations held at the workshop. It is impossible to comment on all of the details (because I did not take enough notes), but what I can recall from the top of my head :
– the undersigned had the honour to open the workshop with a talk on the effects of CMOS scaling versus scaling of photonics,
– two interesting presentations followed about the pinned photodiode as the heart of modern CMOS pixels. TowerJazz gave a lot of details about the pinned diodes, its optimization in technology and in driving circuitry. Several artifacts were illustrated and explained, like lag, noise, full well, transfer, etc. After this presentation, Viimagic illustrated how to implement the diodes in a high-performance image sensor. Focus was paid on CMOS pixels with a global shutter.
– from the application side, Dirk Viehmann gave an overview of solid-state imaging in space. Many people are used to camera modules for mobile phones, but in the presentation, camera systems almost as large as a complete house were shown. Impressing technology !
– ToF was covered in 3 talks, coming from PMD, SoftKinetic and Fraunhofer themselves. Very nice overview of the various methods to perform depth sensing by ToF imagers.
– With respect to non-visible imaging, there were 2 presentations. First one from Holger Vogt on uncooled microbolometers. The second one from Jan Bosiers about wafer-scale CMOS imagers. The bolometer paper described a technology somewhat outside the classical image configurations and technologies, but maybe just for that reason, it was very interesting. Bosiers on his side gave a very nice overview of large area CMOS devices published recently.
– Next two presentations on optics and camera testing. Ziv Attar got the attention of the audience by his ideas and explanation of array cameras. Bernd Jaehne explained in his enthousiastic style the benefits of the EMVA1288 measurement standard.
– The workshop concluded with 3 presentations in the SPAD field : University of Edinburgh, Philips and Politecnico di Milano. Robert Henderson gave a great overview of the recent published SPAD work. Philips was focusing on implementing their specific SPAD technology into a medical product and from Politecnico the introduction of SPADs in InGaAs technology was shown.
I do realize that much and much more information was given on many more topics than listed over here. But I just want to give my readers an idea of what happened over the last couple of days in Duisburg.
Thanks to Werner, Bedrich, Cornelia and all the others for organizing this workshop. Looking forward to the next on in 2014 ?
Albert.
14-06-2012.
Thank you Albert for the kind abstract of the workshop presentations.
I also enjoyed the contributions very much.
Werner
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