Commercial interest
Abbas El Gamal, associate professor of electrical engineering, said that his team has tested the second version of its third-generation CMOS chip and the results are promising. The 1.2-million-transistor chip is producing good 8-bit images, he said, but the team has not finished testing characteristics such as dynamic range.
El Gamal is working with other Stanford researchers through the university's Image Systems Engineering program. Electrical engineering professor Joseph Goodman and several of his students are investigating a method of using the chip's programmability to compensate for imperfections caused by optical lenses.
Industry representatives began contacting El Gamal about two years ago with inquiries about the research and then with offers of funding for the $4 million project. Companies such as Hewlett-Packard Co., Rockwell International Corp. and Analog Devices Inc. have subsidized the research in exchange for the use of the image sensor test set.
Other investing companies include Canon Inc., Eastman Kodak Co., Intel Corp. and Interval Research Corp. These partners have assisted in the design and prototyping stages, have fabricated chips for test purposes and likely will be involved with marketing commercial products as soon as next summer.
Once the chip is completed, applications could include printing, digital photography, silicon and video markets. El Gamal also sees great potential in facial recognition systems for automated teller machines.