At Photonics West in San Francisco, nanoelectronics research centre, Imec, exhibited its ultra-compact hyperspectral imaging sensor technology, which has been integrated into different commercial camera vendor partners including SPIE 2014 Prism Award finalist BaySpec (USA) as well as Adimec (The Netherlands), 3D-One (The Netherlands), and Tattile (Italy).
By applying narrow-band spectral filters at pixel level using semiconductor thin-film processing, Imec’s technology allows for hyperspectral image sensor solutions that are compact, low weight, and highly reliable, to be mass produced at low cost in volume. The sensor technology is beneficial for camera vendors to access new markets such as drone unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for precision agriculture, food quality grading in machine vision, or in-vivo imaging for classification of medical tissues.
‘We are excited to announce the successful integration of our first generation hyperspectral image sensor prototypes by several camera vendor companies. These strategic partnerships on different applications highlight the broad potential of this optical-filter-on-chip sensor solution,’ said Rudi Cartuyvels, senior vice president of smart systems at Imec. ‘Our technology expertise will enable our partners to add new ranges of products, effectively opening up new markets in the booming field of imaging spectroscopy.’
William Yang, president and CEO at spectroscopy company BaySpec, commented: ‘Based on Imec’s hyperspectral sensor technology, we developed the OCI-1000, a handheld spectral imaging ‘point-and-shoot’ device that enabled our company to be finalist at the SPIE Prism Award this year.’
