"With a tiny smartphone 3-megapixel sensor, we could make that a 12-megapixel sensor," said Chief Executive Jess Lee. "Or we could quadruple its sensitivity and ISO. That's the net benefit here." Higher sensitivity means photos that aren't as afflicted with the flecks of color that mean the sensor is capturing noise instead of what a person wants to photograph.

The Menlo Park, Calif.-based company is set to demonstrate its products at the Demo conference in Palm Springs, Calif., on Monday, coming out of stealth mode in the process. Specifically, it'll show images produced by a sensor whose pixels measure only 1.1 microns, or millionths of a meter, on edge.
Essentially, the technology works by adding a new finely tuned light-sensitive layer on top of the silicon chip, Lee said. That layer is more efficient at converting incoming light into electrical signals, and the light isn't partially blocked by a microprocessor's metallic layers, either.

Those who make camera sensors, including Panasonic, Sony, Canon, Micron Technologies spinoff Aptina Imaging, and OmniVision Technologies, have been working to snatch as many photons as possible that come through the camera lens. Among other things, they've reduced the size of circuitry that gets in the way of capturing light, thereby increasing the "fill factor" of each pixel; they've flipped the sensor design around so the circuitry doesn't get in the way of the silicon in an approach called back-side illumination; they've come up with "gapless" microlenses that gather light from one edge of the pixel to the other and focus it on the light-gathering area.

And those sensor makers have made steady progress. In particular, SLR cameras can shoot at ISO sensitivity settings as high as 102,400 in a couple cases. But SLRs use large, expensive sensors that don't fit in a mobile phone camera's physical housing or price constraints, and smaller sensors require some combination of fewer megapixels and smaller pixels with lower sensitivity.

InVisage believes its approach offers a much larger leap in improvement than the existing industry has come up with so far, and though it's aiming initially for high-end mobile phones, the technology will work on ordinary digital cameras, security cameras, and military night-vision systems as well, Lee said.

The company has ambitions to remake the image sensor market, but doing so isn't easy. Foveon, another Silicon Valley image sensor start-up, has had only niche success, for example. And it's going up against major chipmaking experts with established businesses.

Competitor OmniVision has 1.1-micron pixels, too, with its own partnership with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), and said the process will work with sub-micron pixels as well.
InVisage has backing in the form of more than $30 million raised from RockPort Capital, Charles River Ventures, InterWest Partners, and OnPoint Technologies. It's got 30 employees to date and a manufacturing partnership with TSMC, as well.

And Lee argues InVisage has an advantage over incumbent powers: its technology doesn't require as advanced manufacturing equipment to make. OmniVision's 1.1-micron pixel sensor requires manufacturing equipment that can make features as small as 65 nanometers, or billionths of a meter, but InVisage's requires only 110-nanometer equipment, Lee said.

InVisage Executives include Lee, who previously was a vice president of OmniVision and also worked at Altera, Silicon Graphics, and Creative Labs; nanotechnology researcher and Chief Technology Officer Ted Sargent; and Marketing Director Michael Hepp, who worked at OmniVision as in product marketing and program management and also worked at National Semiconductor.

InVisage is starting with smartphones first because it's an established, high-volume market. "We're working with two top-tier handset manufacturers already," Lee said, declining to mention them by name.
The company will begin producing samples of its chips by the end of the year. With mass production typically taking six to nine months after that, people could start seeing them in products by mid-2011, Lee said.

:news.cnet.com