A couple of patent applications caught my eye over the last week – and of course, with me traveling and living out of a suitcase right now I filed it in my head to revisit. These two patents show some unique pixel structures that we are not used to seeing from Canon. Keep in mind that one of the goals of Canon’s sensor development is also to provide sensors for industrial, automotive, and other applications than our precious cameras. When you consider how many cameras there are in autonomous vehicles, you certainly can’t blame Canon for wanting a piece of that action. Also, let’s face some sad facts, there just aren’t enough cameras being sold to keep Canon’s 2 image sensor factories happy.
As with all these applications, though, the use case is sometimes not set in stone and can lead to other areas of research in Canon and surprisingly end up in a camera someday.
This first patent application (Japan 2023-176918) appears the more normal of the two embodiments as the sensor has a pretty standard pixel arrangement and it’s split into areas of high and low sensitivity to increase the sensor’s overall dynamic range. This pixel arrangement also is a dual-pixel autofocus sensor as Canon describes it as left and right parallax. The difference between left and right determines the amount of defocus. Canon puts the charge into the areas that are called FD nodes (floating diffusion), which is essentially storage to hold the value of the pixel part being collected. The solid gray squares along the corners of the pixels are the FD nodes. The purpose of this patent application is to provide low-cost manufacturing of HDR imaging sensors with DPAF.
In this next patent application (Japan 2023-174479) Canon is using a very unique structure to perform high dynamic range imaging. It’s a pretty modern BSI sensor arrangement with two elongated sub-pixels surrounding the main pixel.
This is certainly one of the more unique-looking sub-pixel arrangements I’ve seen Canon experimenting around with. This sensor in these embodiments does not show a DPAF sensor, but I would imagine that Canon could split subpixel 101 to perform autofocus. Canon briefly mentions autofocus via parallax but does not go into the details on how this is accomplished with this sensor. The interesting part of this patent application is that unlike most HDR sensor applications, which show two different sub-pixel sensitivities, in this case, Canon illustrates all three sub-pixels as having different sensitivities.
Canon continues to look at ways of making competitive sensors for use in various fields such as automotive, while I rarely go into these sensors here at CanonRumors, I think it’s important to do it occasionally. Canon is one of the top companies in sensor research, right behind both Sony and Samsung in the number of sensor-related patents. The more Canon manufactures and sells sensors in other markets, hopefully, the manufacturing savings and engineering research can be applied to our camera sensors. We have seen this with Sony with their smartphone image sensor technology slowly moving into their mirrorless cameras.
As with all patent applications, this is a look into Canon’s research and may not end up in an actual product.
Source: Japan Patent Office 2023-174479
Source: Japan Patent Office 2023-176918
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