€15m for European image sensor breakthrough
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A spin out of the imec R&D research lab has raised €15m and emerged from stealth to dramatically improve image sensor technology.
Eyeo in the Netherlands has developed a way around needing filters in image sensors to capture different frequencies of light in a pixel array. Instead the company has developed a technique for building vertical waveguides that split the light on the way down. This allows image sensors to be smaller, lower power and higher resolution as all the energy of the light is available, rather than being absorbed by the red, green and blue filters.
“With more light you can use more light to make everything smaller for the same performance in AR, VR, smartphone, webcams,” Jeroen Hoet, CEO and co-founder of Eyeo tells eeNews Europe. “And then there are customers looking at 3x faster, 3x improved performance, for industrial, high end smartphones, drones.”
Last year was the 50th anniversary of the development of image filters for sensors, and the technology hasn’t essentially changed since then, he says.
“My vision is this becomes a significant player as an image sensor company and that’s a good thing for Europe as there is not much activity in this area. The region deserves to have a leading position in image sensing and the technology can definitely justify that ambition,” he said.
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The new technique is compatible with the CMOS process, with two waveguides feeding four pixels. Eyeo, based in Eindhoven with R&D in Leuven, Belgium, plans to work with foundries to add this layer on top of existing sensor pixel arrays and sell the resulting sensor stack.
“The size of the rectangular waveguides is 400-500nm so in our processing we can use standard lithography technologies so we don’t need e-beam or other exotic equipment,” said Hoet. “The structures are of the order of the wavelength of the light and that’s the scale in which we are playing.”
“The metal layer is produced in a similar fashion but we have some specific shapes and design rules but at the end of the day we go to a CMOS foundry and process it right on top of the imaging layer.”
“At the end of the day we are using CMOS so we can use CMOS economics so the costs can go down and be competitive with other solutions but the way to look at it is for a similar performance we need 3x less area,” he said. “The chip goes down in size so the camera is smaller, the lenses are smaller, so there is a cost drop to be cost competitive for mainstream applications. In other applications there is premium for performance.”
“Across the board we see a lot of interest and we have started engagements with selected customers on how this will fit into Our customers will be the system integrators, the OEMs, and we work with sensor manufacturers. We use existing supply chains and assembly and test houses.”
“For the first products we have the necessary players already engaged to make this happen, and we are aiming at having an evaluation kit in the next two years for the selected customers today and then a kit for other products in volume in say year three or four.”
Developing its own pixel array for a complete image sensor stack is also in the roadmap says Hoet.
“The focus on the intensity and colour has a benefit the smaller you go in the pixel and there are interesting tricks to scale down the size of the pixels in the future so we will have to take that in house, and that in view in the longer term roadmap. We have the clear ambition to go all the way and build the company in the region as independent but its difficult to predict what will happen.”
The funding round was led by imec.xpand and Invest-NL, joined by QBIC fund, High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF) and Brabant Development Agency (BOM).
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