Mitsubishi Electric's Intelligent CMOS Image Sensor (ICIS)
An Eye That's Almost Human
[from a print advertisement that ran in 1998]
Like the key component of the human eye, Mitsubishi Electric's patented Intelligent CMOS Image Sensor (ICIS), the first of its kind in the world, provides not only realtime images, but also a new vision of products and services to come.
Like the popular Nintendo Game Boy camera...
Like a video game in which you're part of the action...
A building security system which senses the slightest movement of an intruder...
A tiny mobile camera which allows you to transmit images via mobile phone no matter where you are...
Or a way to enter your automobile or home in which your unique fingerprint replaces your key.
"The exciting thing about this technology is that it has many practical applications which create new markets," says Dr. Kazuo Kyuma, head of the ICIS Business Promotion Project at Mitsubishi Electric and the man who conceived the ICIS.
Equally exciting is that its revolutionary design, which includes 150 patents, provides dramatically superior performance. Its realtime image processing is ten times faster yet consumes a tenth of the power of CCD (charge-coupled devices). The ICIS enables the creation of smaller, lower power and less expensive cameras than those using CCD technology.
"As semiconductors are the heart of the electronics industry," says Dr. Kyuma, "the ICIS will become the 'eye' for a range of new industries.
The ICIS also represents a new approach in research and development. During a year as a researcher at the California Institute of Technology, Dr. Kyuma was astonished to see how scientists were also business entrepeneurs, turning their ideas into market realities. He's used that concept to create a research team of 14 Mitsubishi Electric engineers with the differing hardware and software skills needed to develop the ICIS.
"The Wright Brothers watched birds, and designed the first airplane," he notes. "I studied the human retina, and designed the ICIS."
Background & Objective: Work on the ICIS design was originated in 1990 by Dr. Kazuo Kyuma at Mitsubishi Electric Corporation's Advanced Technology R&D Center (ATC) in Japan, with a team of about ten people. Today, that number has grown to thirty people working on ICIS hardware and software in the Japan and the United States locations. From 1993 to 1995, Mitsubishi developed the ICIS technology using a gallium arsenide (GaAs) process. In 1995, Mitsubishi began using silicon. The first customer to integrate an ICIS chip into a commercial product was the Nintendo Game Boy Camera in 1998. The toy/camera plugs into the Nintendo Game Boy as a game cartridge and allows users to acquire images and edit them for viewing or output on a small printer. Nintendo opted for the 128 x 128 pixel version with four levels of grey scale. Without such a low-cost and compact sensor available, a camera like this wouldn't have been available for $50 in the consumer market.
Technical Discussion: The work of a research team at MERL, has begun to pay off with their development of a gesture input system. Working together, the ATC and MERL have developed an interactive game using a novel intelligent human-interface system which allows the user to feed information to a computer via vision input.For this project, an ICIS chip module was developed. The module is a single board that embeds an ICIS chip of 32 x 32 pixels, a 16-bit 10 MHz microprocessor, and the lens. The chip module is small (8 x 4 x 3cm) and is capable of taking more than 100 pictures per second. The ICIS chip detects motion and can also capture various characteristics of the images in real-time.
Contact: William Yerazunis
Technology Area: Computer Vision
Modification Date: September 13, 2007
