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Need a price or more application information? Please email Adept Turnkey or call our offices Adept Turnkey Pty Ltd are "The Machine Vision and Imaging Specialists" and distributor of Vision Research products in Australia and New Zealand. To find out more about any Vision Research product, please call Adept Turnkey at Perth (08) 9242 5411 / Sydney (02) 9905 5551 / Melbourne (03) 9384 1775 or contact us online.

BSI Difference BSI is not a new technology, and it has been used with great success in standard and cellphone cameras. By adapting it to high-speed imaging, Vision Research have been able to create a sensor that pushes the boundaries on speed in light-starved conditions.

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Solving analog-to-digital conversion challenges. Embedding analog-to-digital converters (ADC) on CMOS image sensors is standard practice, but the BSI sensor’s speed requires a massive increase in the amount of analog to digital conversion.

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Need a price or more application information? Please email Adept Turnkey or call our offices Adept Turnkey Pty Ltd are "The Machine Vision and Imaging Specialists" and distributor of Vision Research products in Australia and New Zealand. To find out more about any Vision Research product, please call Adept Turnkey at Perth (08) 9242 5411 / Sydney (02) 9905 5551 / Melbourne (03) 9384 1775 or contact us online.

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While modern CMOS image sensors typically have between 1,000 and 10,000 embedded ADC's, the new BSI high-speed sensor has 40,000 ADC's, each converting every 523 ns and generating a large amount of data to off-load from the sensor. To accomplish this task, it incorporates 160 high-speed serial outputs operating at greater than 5 Gbps. This technology is common on CPUs and FPGAs but new on a high-speed imaging sensor. The density of ADC's on the new sensor created power management and electrical crosstalk challenges, which were solved with clever, innovative design. Design engineers discovered that the crosstalk exhibited predictable patterns and developed modeling techniques that helped eliminate the crosstalk altogether, which in turn mitigated imaging artefacts. The sensor supports 2 x 2 binning to maximize throughput at faster speeds. Though not common in high-speed sensors, Vision Research has implemented binning in two previous cameras. It helps mitigate limitations of the sensor’s column ADC architecture, enabling faster speeds than simply decreasing the y-dimension. This approach is subtly different than binning as applied in CCD cameras, where it’s used to primarily boost sensitivity. In this case, we’re using it to boost speed.

Backside Illuminated Sensors (BSI) sensors have been available for over 10-years in mobile phones and specialist digital cameras. However, because of the larger pixel-size required, it has been difficult to design with the high frame rates that many machine vision applications require. With modern technology advancements, in recent years, we've started to see machine vision manufacturers incorporate BSI Sensors into high-speed machine vision camera designs. With Vision Research's capability to design and fabricate their own sensors they have broken new ground with the sensors in the TMX series. High speed sensors need to work with very short exposure times and so light sensitivity is a critical factor in their design. High speed sensors are designed with large pixels to improve sensitivity however this in-turn makes the sensors larger and so difficult to manufacture as BSI. BSI requires additional manufacturing steps. Among them is a wafer backthinning step to remove the bulk silicon on the back of the sensor which becomes the light gathering side. This brings the photodiodes closer to the light source. There are also additional processing steps on the backside of the wafer to anneal the surface and to provide electrical contacts to the front side of the sensor. When thinning the backside of a large sensor there is a much greater probability of defects which creates a low-yield and so many sensors are discarded. Vision Research have been able to achieve a commercially viable yield with their new techniques and this has resulted in these mind-blowingly fast TMX cameras.

With increased speeds comes the need for more light. The backside illuminated sensor found in the Phantom TMX cameras address this issue by shifting the metal parts of a traditional sensor that interfere with incident light to the back of the sensor. Backside illumination also provides increased processing efficiency, which allows cameras to maintain their high throughput levels even as frame rates increase.

The TMX cameras offer an Export Controlled FAST mode option for even higher frame rates. By expanding on its internationally recognised range of Phantom cameras with the TMX series, Vision Research deliver groundbreaking ultra-highspeed imaging. The backside illuminated custom CMOS sensors produce clear, high quality images at speeds not previously possible.