"Many innovations are said to be revolutionary, but are really incremental changes. InVisage's quantum film, on the other hand, really is revolutionary," said Tom Hausken, director of photonics and compound semiconductors at Strategies Unlimited (Mountain View, Calif.) "Quantum dots have been a solution looking for a problem for several years, and InVisage has found a very significant problem they can solve."

According to Morry Marshall, vice president of strategic technologies at Semico Research Corp. (Phoenix), InVisage could have the next generation image sensor. "It gathers more light so you can either make a smaller image sensor for a less expensive cell phone camera, or you make a higher resolution sensor for high-end digital cameras," Marshall said. "It's a huge step forward and the market is also huge, so they will also need to overcome the problems facing any small company when trying to penetrate a large market."

The new semiconducting material was invented by Univeristy of Toronto professor Ted Sargent, who is now chief technology officer at InVisage. Sargent perfected a method of suspending lead-sulfide nanoparticles in a polymer matrix to form a new class of semiconducting polymer that Invisage has spent the last three years integrating into a standard CMOS process. Now it can paint quantum film atop a low-cost wafer that has the electrode array for super-dense high-pixel-count images, but without any of the expensive CMOS photodetectors that make up the bulk of conventional digital camera sensors.

"Our quantum film replaces the silicon used for image capture, but what we have really created here is a new semiconductor material," said Jess Lee, InVisage president and CEO. "Our quantum film even looks like photographic film—an opaque black material that we deposit right on the top layer of our image chip."

By: DocMemory
Copyright © 2023 CST, Inc. All Rights Reserved