SemiSerious

Yesterday, the first departure from the post-Micron imaging company Aptina was announced. Dr. Ilia Ovsiannikov has moved to MagnaChip Semiconductor. As Image Sensor reported in detail, Ovsiannikov leaves the senior post at Micron of R&D manager and architect in Imaging to head up North American R&D for MagnaChip at their new design center in Pasadena.

Image Sensor speculated that perhaps Dr. Ovsiannikov preferred southern California to Aptina’s new home in San Jose. For those who spent time earlier in their careers nearer to the JPL birthplace of CMOS imagers in Pasadena, the urge to move south could prove too great.

For my own part, I have to wonder out loud if there will be more high-level departures out of Aptina.

I am in London this week and just wrapped things up at the Intertech-Pira Image Sensor Conference. It was an interesting event with a diverse programme. There was everything from cameraphones to disposable endoscopes to swarms of robotic surveillance insects. Wait. The bugs were just my own nutty comment lifted from IEEE Spectrum. After a day where a single conference session dealt with both cameraphones and tiny cameras placed on the ends of laproscopic surgical instruments, Technology Review was very timely with their news of a cameraphone microscope.

But there was more to the conference than pictures of internal organs (right before lunch, thank you) and discussions of better ways of yanking gall bladders out through small pipes stuck into people.

What was hot? Well HDR – or high dynamic range – was. However, the definition of HDR was nowhere near consensus. HDR capability will be required in both security cameras as well as forward looking driver assistance cameras for cars. The other technology worth watching is backside illuminated imagers. Although it was not a featured topic in a session or even a single paper, it did pop up again in a few interesting places. I got turned onto the backside idea for the first time at IISW last May. Although it was introduced to me relatively recently, it’s been under investigation for a long time. Now it seems like it is picking up some momentum inside image sensor companies and starting to be considered for a potential production technology.

Sensors were not the only interesting discussion. Day two offered everything from the use of Flickr in image enhancement algorithms to shape memory alloys.

Graham Townsend, founder of Spiral Gateway, presented an interesting alternative to ASIC-based  Image Signal Processors (ISP). His team’s “soft” ISP approach avoids the 12 to 18 months lead time to get image processing algorithms hardwired into silicon. The obvious advantage is that the latest algorithms developed can be used in the cameraphone right as it goes into production, and they can be changed even after product launch simply by compiling new C code. Their chip is only slightly larger than a full custom ASIC providing the same processing (16 versus 14 square millimetres including I/O). The idea is based on RICA or re-configurable instruction cell array. Although I know virtually nothing about this architecture or other microprocessor alternatives, I would say the ISP application is only the tip of the iceberg. I can only explain it by borrowing one of Graham’s bullet points - ASIC netlists, wired up ‘on-demand’ in real time. (By the way, the iceberg analogy is quiteappropriate considering that co-chair, Lindsay Grant introduced Townsend by saying that Graham often referred to CMOS image sensors and imaging 10 years ago as just the tip of another iceberg.)

The shape memory alloys are being used by a company called 1…Limited to move the lens in an autofocus system. The alloy wire takes up almost no space (diameter is only 25 microns) inside the module providing space for larger lenses inside smaller modules. The next application of their wire is for adding zoom to future cameraphones.

Professor Raimondo Schettini from the University of Milano (Bicocca) gave an intriguing lecture on image enhancement techniques. These are more than the simple enhancements like automatic face detection or red-eye reduction that are so well known. His group has developed several algorithms for improving images based on decision trees to determine if the image is indoor or outdoor and so on to select the best algorithm based on determining the context in which the photograph was captured. A very interesting extension of that idea was the use of the web and the growing set of not only posted images but also user comments. This is visionary stuff. And I’m not just saying that because  my own presentation suggested that Google Street View might create the next image sensor boom! Professor Schettini intends to use the vast database available on Flickr to selectively apply algorithms to improve the image quality. As one slide pointed out, this is truly “data mining on all the available data.”
 
After IISW last May, this was my second chance to attend a relatively small meeting of image sensor technologists (and marketers as the case was this week). What I have discovered is that image sensor experts are not only extremely talented in their various fields but also a distinctly fun and classy group of people. I think there is a unique level of understanding within the imaging community that each sub-specialty represents only one part of a complex system that creates a final image and that all of the system components in delivering the final product are equally important.

Now an anecdote…I have a long and strange history of people getting my name wrong. I thought “Don” was pretty simple. I don’t know why, but the telephone company has listed me more than once as “Dan.” People I’ve met even several times often prefer “Dan” as well, but I thought everything would be okay here in London. I hoped I would come to a conference with my name correctly indicated in the programme (it was), give out some business cards with my name spelled properly (it was), and show a title slide with my name shown clearly as “Don,” and people would get it right. But I guess my parents were the ones who got it wrong. Within about 90 minutes of presenting yesterday, I was sitting at the same lunch table as an attendee who referred to me as “Dan the Insights guy.” I hope it doesn’t stick.

That’s all for Dan from London. (Well, if you can’t beat ‘em…)

I would hardly be the first to speculate that creating a separate image sensor division with its own brand is part of a larger plan by Micron management to dump the unit now known as Aptina.

According to a quote from Bob Gove in EETimes, Aptina is targeting Japan and their 9 megapixel sensor is already “effectively penetrating the Japanese name-brand camera market.” But the rapid maturation of the cameraphone market has not been kind to CMOS image sensors, and I doubt that the digital still camera is the answer to rapidly declining margins and increasing pressure on sensor manufacturers to cut costs.

The Aptina announcement tried to focus on moving technology forward – something Micron’s CMOS image sensors excelled at. This year, Aptina will release a 1.4 micron pixel design manufactured using Micron’s 95nm copper process. But that was already on the roadmap and expected based on work Micron published at the International Image Sensors Workshop in 2007. The most interesting part of all the news is that Aptina is moving to supply complete camera modules. The silicon in a typical cameraphone module accounts for less than a third of the total manufacturing cost, so it made sense for the image sensor division to expand vertically into the supply chain. Module design offers not only the biggest target for cutting the camera production cost, but also shrinking the footprint taken up by the image capture system in cell phones. Aptina claims to be sampling the MT9V113M02STC VGA wafer-level camera in their product page. I suspect that part of the module design relies on something similar to Tessera’s OptiML WLC product announced last June.

After reporting a loss of $262 million in their last quarter, Micron is feeling more pressure to make changes and re-focus their business. Is this a sign of the investment community and Micron management being unwilling to take a longer-term view of the imager market, or are there simply no big growth opportunities left?

It must be painful for others in the image sensor business to listen to the news out of Boise over the last several months. Consider Micron’s history in this field. Their success in imaging has run parallel to the unprecedented rise of CMOS image sensor technology itself. Micron came out of nowhere to become the technology leader within five years. Of course the acquisition of Photobit and the pioneering work of Eric Fossum and others in 2001 pulled Micron up the learning curve. With the purchase of Avago at the end of 2006 along with their own in-house R&D in those five intervening years, Micron has an IP portfolio envied by nearly everyone else in the business.

Micron Imaging was an incredible story. Unfortunately, the emphasis might well be on the “was.”

From a management perspective, it seems baffling whether one should combine technology groups and divisions or to create several smaller entities. Is it better to consolidate and leverage economies of scale with “costs of sales” and the many other overhead costs associated with getting your technology into the market? Or will your corporate empire be better off with a loose affiliation of smaller, more entrepreneurial divisions less beholden to the politics and personalities of the big conglomerate?

Perhaps the decision between building a behemoth and keeping things simple and agile was not even on the minds of  Micron’s management. Maybe they were thinking less about how to run an imaging business than how to sell it by creating Aptina.