If you feel offended, I apologize. That I have a way of being. Such chip is done for the Army. Hence they are very expensive toys. So you will not find such sensors in a long time in MF. Contrary to appearances, is not built with several ready-made sensors.
Off the top of my head, I'd expect $50-100K in mask creation costs for an old process, and then each chip costs you a wafer. For a current process you need $300K or so for masks, but who needs a current process to make HUGE sensor cells?
On a related note, I would speculate that the fab lines and processes used to make the iPad3 display could easily be modded to make a large sensor with very large cells.
I can keep making up fake numbers and smart sentences and general BS, while you people talk about Google. But in fact, the marginal costs per sensor for *LO-REZ* 8x10 these days are probably in line with making them for what an H4D60 is sold for today, apart from the initial design and masking costs.
Actually, all of that is engineering, it's not as hard as photography
once someone has already done it the first time, any idiot like me can do it again by following the recipe with a bit of work. Look up the circuits, get process details, spend a night on the simulator, iterate until exhausted ... the chip topography is very repetitive (just like memory, in fact in a way it is memory) and so you probably only have a handful of base cells to deal with.
I'd be surprised if they have more than a couple of people doing the layout on each sensor they push out at DALSA; of course they have the house design libraries to back them up, but so did I when I was young.
Edmund