Advanced CMOS Sensors Made Available

CMOS image sensors are commonly used in special cameras, which provide visual assistance for the visually impaired. But their main disadvantage is that they have relatively poor performances, that they provide only monochrome images, and also that they have a very limited sensitivity to light. A team of experts recently managed to fix a large part of these shortcomings, and created CMOS sensors that were able to perceive and resolve colors, and that were also much more sensitive to light, AlphaGalileo reports.

Future cars will undoubtedly be laden with advanced electronics. Systems to warn drivers of signs they may have ignored, of blind spots in traffic, or of parking situations are already under development, and each of these systems will rely on advanced cameras to recognize and process various scenarios. The video cameras need to fulfill a wide range of requirements in order to be incorporated into a vehicle. They need to be light, economic, robust, highly reliable, and also to able to withstand large temperature differences over short time frames.

At this point, CMOS sensors are only used for in-car systems, but engineers in the automotive industry are looking at options of expanding their uses. The future generation of these devices will need to be able to capture a lot of images in a few seconds, process them, and then elaborate a series of responses to the respective situations. For this, it is essential that they exceed their color-blindness.

“We have integrated a color filter system in the process. In the same way as the human eye needs color-specific cone types, color filters have to be inserted in front of the sensors so that they can distinguish color,” Professor Dr. Holger Vogt, the deputy director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Microelectronic Circuits and Systems IMS, in Duisburg, Germany, says of the new sensors. Usually, CMOS sensors are produced via a semiconductor technique, directly on a silicon wafer.

The innovation could also be used to augment medical equipments such as endoscopes. If doctors get a chance to look at a patient's insides in colors, then they could decide on the best possible course of treatment with a lot more ease, experts believe.