[Leica] New Digital Chip With Twice Film's Resolution?

[Larry Kopitnik <kopitnil@marketingcomm.com>]

 From an article in today's New York Times (and for copyright reasons, 
I'll just quote parts):

>>>>>>>>>>
Only two weeks ago, Eastman Kodak announced a chip able to capture 
digital images with a resolution of 4,096 by 4,096 picture elements 
- -- or pixels -- per square inch. That, by some measures, is about 
twice the resolution of 35-millimeter film.

Today, a company founded by one of Silicon Valley's pioneer chip 
designers, will announce an image-sensing chip capable of the same 
resolution as the Kodak chip, but made using a technique that could 
be much less expensive.

Executives of the company, Foveon, said they had given a prototype 
camera based on their chip to a photographer in Los Angeles, Greg 
Gorman, who had used it to make a portrait of a cowboy. In that 
image, no pixels, or dots, were visible to the eye, even with the 
photograph blown up to a size of 8 feet by 4 feet.
..........

Both companies' achievements have startled industry experts because 
the new devices move far beyond the current industry standards for 
CMOS and for C.C.D. cameras, which until now have been able to 
achieve resolutions of 6 million pixels a square inch. The Foveon and 
Kodak sensors can pack 16.8 million pixels into a square inch.

"If you asked someone if this was achievable in either technology two 
weeks ago, they would have said it was impossible," said Michael 
Berger, an industry analyst at Frost & Sullivan, a market research 
firm in San Antonio.
..........

Foveon's contribution has been to improve the quality of CMOS images 
by continuing to put more computer processing power behind the task 
of capturing the digital image. The new 16.8 million pixel device has 
seven active transistors for each pixel. The benefits include less 
interference, better focusing and more precise exposure times. "When 
the pixels get smarter," Mr. Mead said, "that translates into better 
image quality."

Foveon's principal investor and the company's technology partner is 
National Semiconductor, a big Silicon Valley chip maker. National 
Semiconductor's manufacturing plant in Santa Clara is capable of 
etching chip circuitry only 0.18 micron wide -- a microscopic 
fineness that few other chip makers can equal. By contrast, most 
current low-cost CMOS sensors are made with circuitry of 0.35 or 0.5 
microns, which allows for millions fewer transistors per chip.

National Semiconductor executives said the company was planning to 
take the technology that Foveon had developed for the priciest 
reaches of the professional photography market and make it economical 
enough for some new consumer electronics.

"National's interest is not in thousands of cameras a year but in 
hundreds of millions of cameras a year," said Brian L. Halla, the 
company's president and chief executive. "We could make the world's 
highest-resolution throwaway digital camera and sell it for the price 
of a similar Kodak system."

Foveon officials said they would demonstrate the new 16.8 million 
pixel sensor for the first time today. The sensor, which for now 
captures images in black and white, has almost 70 million transistors 
- -- or about two and a half times the number of transistors used by a 
Pentium III microprocessor chip for computers. Foveon says it expects 
the new sensor to be on the market within a year.
<<<<<<<<<<

The full article can be found online at 
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/09/11/technology/11CHIP.html (but you may 
need to register with the NY Times site first to access it).