Image sensor technology took centre stage in London last week and technology from Europe and Israel demonstrated the growing importance of imaging technology to so many of today’s products.    

Scottish reconfigurable chip designer Spiral Gateway gave details of its first product, aimed at providing high resolution image processing in mobile phones.

The company produced a test chip in December with 80 reconfigurable elements in a 0.18[micro]m process and is working on its first product, called RICA, with 700 to1,000 of the 'instruction cells', says Graham Townsend, CEO, speaking at last week’s Image Sensors Europe conference.

Meanwhile the image division of Cypress Semiconductor, which is based in Holland after the acquisition of Fillfactory in 2004, has teamed up with a document management company on holographic storage using traditional optical discs.

Instead of using laser to read dots, high speed image sensors read 3D images from the disc, dramatically increasing the amount of data to over 200Gbytes. This also opens up new markets.

“This makes ROM a printing technology, so on a credit card you could have over 2Gbytes of data in the hologram and you just need an image sensor to read it,” says Joost Seijnaeve, business development manager at Cypress.

The Israeli division of optical IP developer Tessera has also developed a way of reducing the size of image sensor modules and stacking them on top of other chips.

Its Micro Via Packaging (MVP), launched at the conference, allows packaging companies to drill through the back of a die to the pads to make connections. This reduces the size and complexity of the die, allowing another 200 die on a wafer for VGA image sensors, says Bents Kidron, v-p of marketing at Tessera.

The technique also increases the reliability and allows the sensor to sit directly on a DSP or memory chip.

Tessera is looking to license the technology to other chip makers to build more complex stacked devices. The technique uses polymers and metals from outside the semiconductor industry to keep costs down, says Giles Humpston, the UK-based director of R&D.