In the early 1990s, Sabrina Kemeny was among the researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California who made spacecraft smaller and cheaper. The key was discovering how to build an optical sensor on a single semiconductor, allowing for smaller components that consumed less power.
"That was the breakthrough," Kemeny recalled. "It was a dislocating kind of technology."
Kemeny and a handful of colleagues were so excited about the photographic applications of this semiconductor that in 1995, over a kitchen table, they created a company to design it for other companies. But their start-up, called Photobit, lacked the size and capital to go ahead and make this "camera on a chip," a type known in the semiconductor industry as a CMOS (pronounced SEE-moss), which stands for complementary metal oxide semiconductor.
The destiny of Photobit changed nine months ago, when Micron Technology, the large semiconductor maker based in Boise, Idaho, bought the company and renamed it Micron Imaging. Kemeny is director for technical marketing at there.
That decade-long journey from the laboratory is part of a new race in the chip industry, where growth in demand has been disappointingly slow for nearly everything. A notable exception is the photographic applications of CMOS. These chips are responsible for products that are just beginning to reach consumers -- including cameras within cell phones, cameras in tiny capsules that can pass through the body to diagnose disease and tiny cameras mounted on personal computers. The chips have many other uses in security systems and industry.
Unlike the technology bubble of the late 1990s, a time when fanciful dot-coms without real products raced to overpriced initial public offerings, the race to dominate the market for cameras on chips is an old-fashioned kind of technology battle: Real companies are vying to invent real products that touch millions of consumers.
The older technology that CMOS is beginning to displace is called the charge-coupled device, or CCD, invented at Bell Labs in the late 1960s and first used in products like fax machines.
The CCD uses passive sensors, or tiny eyes, that detect light. An outside source of power is required to get the image from the devices, and other circuitry is needed, too. That makes them relatively big and expensive. CMOS chips, by contrast, consist of active sensors that have tiny transistors as power sources.
Because of the way CMOS chips are made, sensors and many other processing functions can be placed on one chip.
CMOS technology greatly reduces the amount of power used, allowing batteries to last longer in hand-held devices, but it also provides photographic image quality almost as good as that of charge-coupled devices.
In-Stat/MDR, a Scottsdale, Arizizona, a unit of the Reed Elsevier Group, a publishing and industry research group, says the number of CMOS chips made each year will triple from current levels by 2006. But In-Stat/MDR said sales, which totaled US$1.2 billion last year, were expected to rise only to US$1.6 billion in 2006 because the price of each chip would decline as production accelerated.
Micron and others define the market more broadly, putting its potential at US$4 billion in annual sales. Whichever figures are correct, it's clear that solid growth is occurring in one area of the otherwise depressed semiconductor industry.
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