Maturing, in the negative sense, aka slowing down.
One of my former employers, IBM, had a similarly Orwellian take on language from time to time. One of my favorites was “stabilize”, as in “We’re gonna stabilize that product line.” Sounds good, right? What it actually meant was that we’re going to stop making improvements, and, at some point, we’ll stop fixing bugs.”
But I digress.
I recently ran across a very short, moderately non-technical, paper, describing the author’s take on the state of the art in sensor design as of a year or so ago.
I’ve read about a lot of this in bits and pieces, but seeing these amazing things all put together in one place was impressive.
Take a look:
One of the things that jumped out at me was the 1.5 um (!) optical stack on a 1.1 um pitch sensor. Then there’s chip stacking (with 90 nm features and 40 nm ISP features!), BSI, and on and on.
No, I don’t think sensor tech is maturing. And that’s a good thing.
What jumped out at me was the parallel development going on. The camera releases skew towards Sony as the clear owner of the high ground, but this paper makes the situation look a lot more fluid…