Next50
ROHM’s illuminated headquarters building is regarded as one of Kyoto’s distinctive winter scenes. The photograph below was captured with a pilot version of a camera equipped with the world’s first image sensor jointly developed by ROHM and the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST): Research Center for Photovoltaics.
This image sensor — the photo-detecting part that catches light — is made with a compound of copper, indium, gallium, and selenium (CIGS) instead of the conventional material, silicon. CIGS has been widely recognized as a next-generation photovoltaic cell that achieves high performance at low cost, and its photo-detecting sensitivity greatly exceeds that of silicon. The use of this material in the photo-detecting part of the image sensor results in excellent characteristics not seen in conventional silicon.
This R&D project integrates AIST’s CIGS membrane generation technology and ROHM’s IC microscopic processing technology. In other words, this project dramatically improves the performance of image sensors by integrating a cutting-edge next-generation photovoltaic cell with IC research.
Since the photo-detecting sensitivity (quantum efficiency) of CIGS exceeds that of silicon and the structure of CIGS allows the size of the sensor part to be increased, the sensitivity of the image sensor can be dramatically improved. CIGS has the potential to capture images in light levels too low for conventional devices.
Another characteristic of the CIGS image sensor is its high sensitivity to the NIR range (up to the wavelength of approximately 1,300 nm), an achievement barely possible with conventional silicon. This characteristic allows for the super-sensitive capture of infrared images even in complete darkness.
The high sensitivity up to the NIR range is ideal for application in fields such as the security industry, which is a growing market for surveillance cameras. It can also be used for vehicle night-vision systems that contribute to safer nighttime driving.
