Sometimes DPReview is like an opal mine, with gems to be found buried in tons of muck.
For digital camera tech. enthusiasts, one such gem is to be found in a recent thread on sensor technologies, in the posts of Eric Fossum, the inventor of CMOS sensor technology (working for NASA/JPL). You could jump in at Eric Fossum's first post.
(There is still plenty of muck within that thread too!)
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Hi here is the post, a very good read. Maybe MFD will change to CMOS
Oregonian2 wrote:
> It just didn't work
> very well for optical sensors and that's the only reason CCD's were
> ever used. CMOS was already a mature process when digital cameras
> became a consumer product -- just didn't do good optical sensors.
>
This history is a little mixed up. The CCD was invented in 1970 and worked better than nMOS passive pixel image sensors and was adopted for video and still picture cameras. CMOS digital IC technology came around the same time or a year or two later. CMOS active pixel sensor technology, the technology used by Canon, was invented (by me) and developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion laboratory for lower power, more compact still cameras for interplanetary spacecraft. It was then adopted for consumer use by Photobit (and then many others). Its initial growth was related to cost, but for cell phones, low power and on-chip integration (size) is as important or more so, than cost. Canon adopted JPL's technology for digital camera use and as far as I can see, the sensor works as well or better than any CCD. Ironically, NASA, stilll stuck 15 years behind the times for stuff that actually flies, is still flying mostly CCDs. However, CMOS image sensors also have the advantage of being much much more radiation hard than CCDs, so I imaigne they will displace CCDs eventually, as they were originally intended for.
-Eric
