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Services

Custom development

CMOS Design

We are experienced in designing advanced VLSI circuits, so that a single die will contain all the functionalities needed to sense, control the sensor and interface with the rest of the world. We use industry standard tools for the design, following well-established practices. Starting from the schematic capture, the design is thoroughly simulated, including technology and environmental variations. The layout is then prepared and simulated in the same way the schematic was, but this time with parasitic effects from internal routing added. Layouts are verified using foundry-provided design rule checkers (DRC) and compared to the schematic to confirm their matching (Layout vs Schematic, LVS).

Image sensors

Our engineering design team has a thorough knowledge and vast experience with all types of image sensors: from traditional rolling shutter to more advanced global shutter sensors; from event-driven vision sensors to single-photon avalanche detectors. We can integrate CCDs in your circuit. Our sensors can see the visible, and beyond in the infrared and in the ultraviolet and X-rays, as well as charged particles. Of course, for some of these radiations the sensing material will be different than silicon. In this case the readout circuits will be in a Readout Integrated Circuit (ROIC) and the sensor will be hybrid. High-speed and ultra-high speed (in excess of 1 million frames per second) sensors are also in our portfolio.

Readout systems

In order to interface our sensors with the external world, readout or proximity electronics is needed. We can take care of this for you, from the design of ad-hoc packages to complex, FPGA-based readout circuits, including high-speed interfaces. We design our printed circuit boards (PCB) using advanced CAD tools. In our readout systems we have powerful FPGA equipped with the firmware we have developed. We develop the software platform to control the sensors to make easy to exploit their performance.

Characterisation

We have developed our proprietary test platform, Evalima, the IMASENIC evaluation kit. This platform provides a cost-effective and time-saving solutions for characterising image sensors. We can swiftly adapt it to the new sensor we have developed for you, thus reducing time-to-market for your product. The hardware platform includes also a laptop that runs our software to control the sensor, acquire sequence of images as well as integration time sweeps, which are at the base of the well-known Photon Transfer Curve method. From the acquired images, our software will extract the electro-optical parameters of your sensor.