Canesta selects TowerJazz CIS technology for consumer 3-D image sensors

MIGDAL HAEMEK, ISRAEL & SUNNYVALE, USA: TowerJazz, the global specialty foundry leader, today announced that Canesta Inc. is using TowerJazz’s CMOS image sensor (CIS) technology to manufacture its innovative CanestaVision 3-D image sensors.

CanestaVision chips are the industry's world’s first single-chip CMOS 3-D image sensor System on a Chip (SoC) for use in consumer desktop computing, TV and entertainment applications. Next-generation consumer 3-D image sensors designed to enable a device to understand and interact with its environment will fuel the image sensor market. According to iSuppli, the CMOS image sensor market was $7.3 billion in 2007. It is expected to grow to $9.7 billion in 2012.

3-D image sensors enable consumers to interact with devices in natural ways and are expected to be widely deployed in a variety of markets including PC, consumer electronics and entertainment as well as many industry applications, among others. New mechanisms in which a user's actions or gestures drive the functions of a device have been proven by the success of recent video game and mobile phone products.

“We have a great deal of sophisticated and unique intellectual property in our chips,” said Jim Spare, president and CEO of Canesta. “We are excited to have the use of TowerJazz’s advanced CMOS image sensor manufacturing processes.”

Spare explained that 3-D image sensors are critically important to evolve to natural user interfaces for complex consumer electronic products. “We are seeing early versions of this in the form of waving at systems to control them. Our chips will enable systems to do this as well as the fine-grained, close-up control that goes beyond multi-touch and is key to future applications. Over the next decade, we are likely to see new, innovative applications that require an integrated 3-D image sensor with advanced characteristics.”

Dr. Avi Strum, VP and GM of Specialty Business Unit, TowerJazz, said: “Canesta’s solution is the most robust in the industry, offering the best performance compared to any other competing solution. The very tight R&D collaboration and roadmap alignment between our two companies provides near and long term innovative solutions that will further improve performance and power consumption in future generations and will allow wins in many more applications, such as the mobile computing area.”