Where In The World Is Foveon: The Silicon Eye
Continued from 'Imaging Beyond Pixels: Where In The World Is Foveon?'….
While researching my print article, I coincidentally happened across several individuals who had a close past history with Foveon, either as former employees of the company itself or of its foundry partners. They all insisted on anonymity, but they consistently mentioned availability- and cost-crippling sensor yield issues that repeatedly hobbled Foveon's aspirations. Also, in lieu of a direct conversation with Foveon representatives, I turned to a book about the company called 'The Silicon Eye' that had long lingered on my to-read pile.
The Silicon Eye's author is George Gilder, a tech industry analyst. Gilder is well known for his unbridled (some would say excessive) enthusiasm for the topics he writes about, and he has a reputation for recurrently shilling Foveon in his newsletter and within his presentations, so I admittedly cracked opened the book with no shortage of pre-assembled cynicism. I was, I must say, pleasantly surprised with what I read, although not overwhelmingly so. To wit, although the paperback edition is 285 pages long (excluding the glossary, acknowledgements and index), Gilder doesn't begin to cover Foveon in detail until page 201.
The Silicon Eye is an engaging overview of Carver Mead and his team of students-later-employees at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and of Federico Faggin. I also enjoyed the historical perspective on Synaptics, a spin-off of Mead's many-year-long struggle to translate his analog sensing and processing theories into shipping products. Ironically, the first fruits of Synaptics' R&D, as explained in Chapter 15 'Seizing The Sword', ended up being digital-centric. And Gilder was more moderate about Foveon's future prospects than I anticipated he'd be.
He points out, for example, the company's already well-entrenched CCD and CMOS sensor competitors, along with the Drucker's Rule necessity for Foveon's products to be 10 times better than those competitors in order to displace them to any meaningful degree. But ultimately, I walked away from The Silicon Eye knowing little more about the secretive company than I did before reading page 1 of the book. One paragraph is particularly telling, in my mind (bolded emphasis added for effect):
Nonetheless, just one month before Photokina 2000, while the company was still preparing to push its prisms to a mostly indifferent camera market, Dick Merrill emerged from his aluminum chassis with yet another concept for a single-chip color filter. Added to his original idea was a simple but revolutionary process step entirely compatible with the CMOS process flow. Still a company secret today, the new Merrill scheme turned the showstopper inside out. What had previously been an impossible obstacle to a vertical filter became a radical simplification and improvement. An invention as elegant as Carver Mead's exploitation of the parasitic bipolar transistor as a photodetector, Merrill's idea was still more commercially promising.
Foveon unveiled the X3 image sensor at the September 2000 Photokina. Six and a half years later, the company seemingly still hasn't achieved sustainable success. Draw your own conclusions.
I hope this writeup will stimulate a response from the company. If so, I'll report back after we've had a chance to chat. And if any of you have thoughts about Foveon you'd like to share, either anonymously or publicly, and either based on arm's-reach observation or hands-on experience, I'm all ears (or is that eyes?).
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