Sony smartphones may not be flying off the shelves. Still, even if you bought a recent iPhone or one of many Android phones, you’re a Sony customer contributing to its production headache. While Sony Xperia handsets remain niche, despite its best efforts to pitch unlocked and SIM-free devices, its camera sensor business struggles to keep up with its success.
Samsung often gets the lion’s share of attention when it comes to dominating the supply chain, what with Samsung Display churning out panels, its semiconductor arm delivering memory, and its battery division dealing with power. However, Sony has a similar success story, with its semiconductor unit responsible for wildly popular camera chips.
Although most phone-makers have their branding for cameras, their photography boasts many dips into the same camera chip supplies. Sony is one of the most successful, providing the CMOS for Apple iPhone 11 Pro. While individual devices have their software and tweaks, the core sensor comes from Sony’s production lines.
The rise in how many cameras a single device now has is turned out to be a challenge for Sony. Indeed, the company plans to run its production lines constantly throughout the holidays, division chief Terushi Shimizu confirmed to Bloomberg. Even then, meeting demand is difficult.
“We have to apologize to customers because we just can not make enough,” Shimizu says. Sony Semiconductor is now only second to PlayStation in the company’s various businesses when it comes to profit, and of that, 86-percent of revenue comes from image sensors.
Unsurprisingly, then, reinvestment is on the roadmap. Sony plans to open a new production facility in Nagasaki, Japan, though that won’t be ready to manufacture sensors until April 2021. Before that, capital spending is more than double this fiscal year.
That will go not only on maximizing production but developing new sensor types, as Sony tries to keep ahead of the curve of what its phone making customers want to offer their users. Time-of-Flight, or ToF, is one area of interest where sensors can accurately create depth maps of a place by rapidly bouncing laser light off the scene and timing its return.
It is a technology likely to be instrumental as augmented reality gains traction, and app makers look to include digital graphics into real-world scenes. Apple is believed to be readying new iPhone models with ToF capabilities for release later in 2020. Beyond that, the same sensor technology could be applied to augmented reality eyewear, such as the much-rumored Apple smart glasses.
It seemed like the megapixel race had stalled for a while, as smartphone cameras reached a certain peak. Then the hunt for squeezing in more and more pixels was sidelined in favor of alternative lens zooms and computational photography. That momentum has built up again over the past year, with Samsung rumored to include a 108 megapixel camera in the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S11 flagship. At the same time, though, trying to accommodate multiple sensors into a single phone presents clear packaging headaches and limiting the ability to boost resolution simply by including a larger overall sensor.
The solution may well involve artificial intelligence. Sony announced last month that it was forming a new global division, Sony AI, which would explore how machine learning, neural networks, and other technologies could improve different areas of its business. One of the three key divisions expected to benefit is sensors and imaging.
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