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Abstract
CMOS image sensors are found in nearly every camera today and about 6+ billion are made each year. This talk will discuss their invention at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the early 1990’s for use in interplanetary spacecraft, and their subsequent commercialization by the Caltech spin-off Photobit. Besides catching up on CMOS image sensors today, the invention and development of the CMOS Quanta Image Sensor (QIS) at Dartmouth will be presented, including “why” and how they work, and their commercialization by the Dartmouth spin-off Gigajot.  The QIS is a low-power room temperature photon-counting and photon-number resolving image sensor that does NOT use avalanche multiplication, and which has high resolution and very low dark current. Gigajot has reported up to a 163 Mpixel device with 1.1um pixel pitch and read noise in the deep-sub-electron range.










 

Speakers Bio
Dr. Eric R. Fossum is the Krehbiel Professor of Engineering, Director of the PhD Innovation Program, and the Vice Provost for Entrepreneurship and Technology Transfer at Dartmouth. He is best known for inventing the CMOS active pixel image sensor at NASA/JPL, now used in billions of cameras worldwide in smartphones, webcams, automobiles, medical devices, and space instruments. He has authored more than 300 technical papers, holds 185 U.S. patents, and is a co-founder of several technology companies. Fossum is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, inductee of the National Inventors Hall of Fame, and a Fellow of IEEE and Optica. His honors include the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the IS&T/Optica Land Medal and the NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal, among others. He continues to advance photon-counting image sensor technology while mentoring the next generation of innovators.