Can you imagine how much flash these things are going to require?
Foveon Claims Breakthrough
In New Digital Camera Chips
By DON CLARK
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
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A start-up founded by scientist Carver Mead claims a breakthrough in the chips used to make digital cameras, a development that could sharply drive down prices and help dislodge a rival technology.
Foveon Inc., a closely held company in Santa Clara, Calif., plans to announce Monday that it has set a new image standard for sensors constructed using a production process known as CMOS, for complementary metal oxide semiconductor. That performance -- the ability to create an image with 16.8 million picture elements, or pixels -- would mark the first time that CMOS chips have reached parity with image sensors called charge-couple devices, or CCDs, that have led the field for 30 years.
The process used to create chips can be vitally important in determining the cost of making them, and hence the price of cameras. CMOS is widely believed to have major cost advantage over CCDs, since it is the same process used in more-widely used chips that are driving heavy investments in new manufacturing facilities.
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Pixel Perfect: Basics of Digital Camera Resolution
The Lingo
Image resolution: The key specification for a digital camera. Image resolution is how fine an image it can produce.
Pixel: These are dots of light that determine image quality. The more dots, the better the picture. Megapixel cameras capture more than one million pixels in each frame.
Sample Resolutions
Low: Images typically have 640 pixels across by 480 pixels down, or a total of 307,200 pixels. This level of resolution looks good on a computer screen but isn't sharp enough for prints.
Medium: A typical image might have 2,160 by 1,440 pixels, or 3.1 million total. Images at this resolution are acceptable for consumer prints, but not good enough for professional or studio quality.
High: Up to 4,096 by 4,096 pixels, or about 16 million total. The highest resolution, just reaching the market, and in the same class as the best professional film cameras.
Sources: Foveon; Eastman Kodak Co.
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Dr. Mead, a pioneer in semiconductor technology and professor at the California Institute of Technology, says the CMOS breakthrough will hasten the day that consumers will be able to afford professional-quality digital cameras -- and help consign film to the same marginal role as vinyl records in a CD-dominated world.
Analysts who have been briefed on the new chip say it sounds promising. "It's very significant," said Alexis Gerard, president of FutureImage Inc., a San Mateo, Calif., market-research firm. "If the images that are shown are equivalent or better to a CCD, this can very well be viewed as a turning point."
Digital cameras come in many types and prices, from relatively crude $50 devices used with personal computers to $20,000 studio cameras. The image-sensor chips are often the most expensive element in such products. The CCD in a high-end camera might cost $1,000, compared with $450 for a comparable CMOS sensor, said Michael Berger, an analyst at Frost & Sullivan, a market-research firm in San Jose, Calif.
Many consumer and low-end professional cameras have image resolution of 1.2 million to three million pixels, Mr. Gerard said. They make acceptable prints but are well short of the quality of the best film cameras, especially when images are enlarged. Top professional gear can capture six million pixels, or six megapixels.
Foveon, whose major investor and manufacturing partner is National Semiconductor Corp., is now known mainly for selling high-end digital cameras. Its 16-megapixel chip has nearly 70 million transistors, or 2.5 times the number in Intel Corp.'s Pentium 3 microprocessor. The company says the chip offers three times the resolution of any prior CMOS device as well as high-end CCD sensors now found in cameras, and will help fuel a new business in selling chips to other camera makers. Cameras with the new chip are expected to be available early 2001.
But the CCD field is also moving rapidly. Eastman Kodak Co. last month announced its own 16-megapixel CCD chip, as well as plans to market image sensors to other companies.
Chris McNiffe, a Kodak spokesman, said it is developing its own CMOS chips and is eager to look at Foveon's announcement. But he was skeptical that a 16-megapixel CMOS chip would produce the same high-quality pictures as his company's forthcoming chip. "You are going to get better image quality out of a CCD than from CMOS," he said.
Not so, says Dr. Mead, who founded Foveon in 1997 and remains chairman. He compares photographs created using the chip, which will be shown for the first time next week at a trade show in Germany, to the work of such artists as Ansel Adams. "The reason we got into this business is to make better-quality images than film, not just equal quality," he says. "That's what microelectronics will make possible." |
