Sony Photography News and Rumors

Sony and Prophesee Develop a Stacked Event-Based Vision Sensor
with the Industry’s Smallest*1 Pixels and Highest*1 HDR Performance
*1:Among stacked event-based vision sensors, as of announcement on February 19, 2020.

Tokyo, Japan—Sony Corporation and Prophesee S.A. today announced they have jointly developed a stacked event-based vision sensor with the industry’s smallest*1 4.86μm pixel size and the industry’s highest*1 124dB (or more) HDR performance. The new sensor and its performance results were announced at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) held in San Francisco in the United States, starting on February 16, 2020.

The new stacked event-based vision sensor detects changes in the luminance of each pixel asynchronously and outputs data including coordinates and time only for the pixels where a change is detected, thereby enabling high efficiency, high speed, low latency data output. This vision sensor achieves high resolution, high speed, and high time resolution despite its small size and low power consumption. This accomplishment was made possible by combining technical features of Sony’s stacked CMOS image sensor, resulting in small pixel size and excellent low light performance that are achieved by the use of Cu-Cu connection*2, with Prophesee’s Metavision® event-based vision sensing technologies leading to fast pixel response, high temporal resolution and high throughput data readout. The newly developed sensor is suitable for various machine vision applications, such as detecting fast moving objects in a wide range of environments and conditions.

*2:Technology that provides electrical continuity via connected Cu (copper) pads when stacking the back-illuminated CMOS image sensor section (top chip) and logic circuits (bottom chip). Compared with through-silicon via (TSV) wiring, where the connection is achieved by penetrating electrodes around the circumference of the pixel area, this method gives more freedom in design, improves productivity, allows for a more compact size, and increases performance. Sony announced this technology in December 2016 at the International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) in San Francisco. Read More »