Micron taps UK nous

According to JIDC head Junichi Nakamura, the centre has more than 20 engineers designing image sensors, aimed predominantly at high end digital still cameras and digital camcorders. "The market is demanding higher pixel counts and higher frame rates," he confirmed. "The pixel war is continuing." In a move to bring these developments to market more quickly, Micron's UK Image Design Centre in Bracknell is collaborating closely with its Japanese counterpart. Director Dr David Burrows, pictured, said his centre has teams developing circuit IP and logic IP. "They are developing reusable libraries," he noted, "and this IP can be used by Japan." In fact, Bracknell developed IP has been used by Micron teams around the world. One area the Bracknell team is working on is high speed data transfer. "Image sensors are sensitive to noise and so on," Dr Burrows explained. "If you drive high frame rate data off chip over a parallel cmos interface, you'll get picture degradation. What we've done is to develop a high speed interface which gets data off the chip at Gbit/s rates with very little degradation." Having developed sensors with 1.4µm pixels, Micron is now researching smaller dimensions. "Our challenge is to maintain picture quality," Dr Burrows continued, "as we approach optical limits where you can almost count the number of electrons in a pixel."