Eyeo, a new startup from Eindhoven, The Netherlands, has emerged on the sensor scene with new technology and an aim to enable image sensors in everything from smartphones to industrial cameras to self-driving cars to provide better-quality, higher-resolution images with more accurate color representation.
The company, spun off late last year from imec, the European nanotechnology research center, just announced a funding round of €15 million (a little over USD $17 million). It argued that billions of image sensors sold every year have a blind spot, and it’s a big one: The legacy color filter technology they use “throws away” as much as 70% of the light collected by the sensor, Eyeo CEO Jeroen Hoet told Fierce Electronics.
Eyeo wants to upgrade the world’s image sensors with “color-splitting” single photon waveguide technology that Hoet said literally “guides” light photons into pixels rather than filtering out some of the collected light.
Many image sensors still use red, green, and blue color-filtering on pixels to render an image or video, Hoet said, but they block some light, and ultimately limit the scaling of the pixel size below ~0.5 micron. This has led device makers like smartphone manufacturers to compensate by increasing the size of their on-device cameras along with the size of the smartphones themselves (Anyone who has had a too-big phone flip out of the back pocket of their pants can attest that this trend may have met its limits.)
Using the evolution of the Apple iPhone as an example, Hoet explained, “If you compare the latest version with a version of 10 years ago, the camera, the picture quality, everything, became a lot better. The way they made the picture quality better is… they have increased the size of the camera. It was a smaller camera, now it's quite a big camera in the latest generations. The reason why they do this is the sensor chip inside of the camera, they had to make bigger because if you make that sensor bigger, you can essentially collect more light.”
Hoet said more efficient and effective filtering technology can give device designers greater flexibility to create slimmer, smaller-form-factor, less costly devices that could be used in a greater variety of applications–not just in smartphones, but also industrial equipment, automotive settings, or AR/VR devices–to produce better images.
Eyeo is eyeing the smartphone ecosystem as a huge potential market for its technology, although Hoet acknowledged that long technology adoption of that industry means it could be 2030 before we see its innovation in new devices. The industrial IoT and video surveillance markets could represent a much more immediate opportunity.
But first, Eyeo needs evaluation kits to help sensor firms and other device manufacturers take its technology for a spin, and that’s partially what the new seed funding–courtesy of imec.xpand, Invest-NL, QBIC fund, High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF) and Brabant Development Agency (BOM)--will be used for, as well as financing the firm’s efforts to further improve its current camera sensor designs and optimize the waveguide technology for production scalability. Hoet said the company hopes to have those eval kits ready within the next two years, after which Eyeo's time-to-market also could be quickened by the fact that existing CMOS processes can be leveraged to produce sensors that incorporate its technology.