Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2006/01/15
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]If I have understood the issue properly - a gross assumption - the problem is that large imaging chips are a side-branch technology. From the outset R&D on chips has centred on speed and miniturisation with great success. The CCDs in P&S cameras, smaller than the smallest fingernail, are in step with this. APS and larger sensors are almost a new branch of the technology with complete new R&D requirements which not everybody either has or chooses to devote the resource to developing. On top of that the results available from current P&S cameras are completely satisfactory for 99% of their users. Development is likely to follow smaller with similar quality not bigger and better, simply because of market size. My son already prefers the pitiful camera in his phone to carrying an additional "box", for him and his friends the quality is good enough to outweigh the inconvenience. A bit like HiFi where size, capacity and battery life are more important in the portables market than sound quality, such for the minute proportion of the market where quality is more important there will soon be no products at all. On top of this I understand that every silicon wafer on which the chips are made has a certain number of defects per area. Clearly this makes a situation where there is a chip area where 100% scrap is statistically inevitable and means also that reject rates will exponentially increase with size. I don't know how much effort has been put into reducing the number of defects per area recently, if the cost of super pure wafers is extremely high and the size of chips has continued to miniaturise it is entirely possible that there has been little recent research done on this area. It could well be that the projected market for large chips is so small that only small R&D budgets will ever be devoted to it and the chips themselves will always be special small production run items which are relatively very expensive. Frank On 16 Jan, 2006, at 04:28, Scott McLoughlin wrote: > Makes sense to me. What doesn't make sense is why more companies > aren't then manufacturing more sensors. Business abhors a vacuum, as > it were. Certainly in other areas of semiconductor design and > fabrication > (and associated supporting chipsets, firmware and the like) there > is no > shortage of companies - and plenty of venture capital to start new > ones. > > What is the $$ volume of the camera industry (consumer, commercial, > industrial)? If it's relatively small, that might explain the > differences with > the rest of the (huge) chip industry. > > Scott