Sony and Prophesee S.A. have jointly developed a stacked event-based vision sensor with the industry’s smallest 4.86μm pixel size and the industry’s highest 1 124dB (or more) HDR performance. The industry’s highest 1 124dB (or more) HDR performance is made possible by placing only back-illuminated pixels and a part of N-type MOS transistor on the pixel chip (top), thereby allowing the aperture ratio to be enhanced by up to 77%. High sensitivity/low noise technologies Sony has developed over many years of CMOS image sensor development enable event detection in low-light conditions (40mlx).

The new stacked event-based vision sensor detects changes in the luminance of each pixel asynchronously and outputs data including coordinates and time only for the pixels where a change is detected, thereby enabling high efficiency, high speed, low latency data output. This vision sensor achieves high resolution, high speed, and high time resolution despite its small size and low power consumption. 

This accomplishment was made possible by combining technical features of Sony’s stacked CMOS image sensor, resulting in small pixel size and excellent low light performance that are achieved by the use of Cu-Cu connection, with Prophesee’s Meta vision event-based vision sensing technologies leading to fast pixel response, high temporal resolution and high throughput data readout. The newly developed sensor is suitable for various machine vision applications, such as detecting fast-moving objects in a wide range of environments and conditions.