Invisage Unveils 2MP NIR Sensor

BusinessWire: Invisage announces SparkP2 sensor featuring global shutter, 3x higher light response in 940nm NIR band and over 20x lower power consumption than competing solutions. SparkP2 is a 1.1 um pixel, 2MP QuantumFilm sensor in 1/7-inch format for a less than 3mm thin z-height.

Talking about structured light 3D sensors, InVisage QuantumFilm global shutter works in tune with a pulsed LED, which optimizes the LED battery usage to be just 10 mW (versus 750 mW for LEDs used with rolling shutter NIR cameras). SparkP2�s fast global shutter allows the NIR light source to be pulsed for extremely short intervals instead of remaining continuously illuminated, thus overcoming sunlight while at the same time capturing movement more accurately and using far less net power.

SparkP2 is sampling in April 2016 with mass production scheduled by Summer 2016.

Brian O�Rourke, Senior Principal Analyst, Consumer Devices and MEMS & Sensors at IHS Technology, said in an email to VentureBeat, �There�s certainly opportunity here for InVisage. The types of use cases that they�re going after, such as facial and iris recognition, depth-mapping and eye and gesture tracking, have a wide variety of imaging applications, from security to online banking to gaming. These will all benefit from better performance in the IR range. These applications should grow significantly over the next few years, from a limited current base. The barrier for InVisage is the strong, established companies that they will be competing against in the image sensor market, companies like Sony, Samsung, OmniVision and ON Semiconductor. As a start-up, it�s extremely difficult to compete against companies that currently generate billions of dollars in revenue in your target market. You not only have to build a better mouse trap, but you have to be able to market it effectively.�